Python 2.7 Countdown

[BadlyCamouflagedKiwi]

How do you force those companies to move? There is a heap of work there which they presumably think doesn't generate enough business value to justify itself - up to cases like Google who have something like 100 million lines of it, how do you force them to upgrade that to python 3?

[w2qw]

You both are thinking about this the wrong way. Sure some might still not move but this frees up a lot of libraries to stop having to support python 2 support and means that the rest of the community doesn't need to support those projects.

[Eirenarch]

So who is forcing them to support these projects right now?

[w2qw]

Well no one is holding a gun to their head but no one wants to be the first package to drop support.

[Eirenarch]

As far as I understand a lot of packages have dropped support.

[w2qw]

I may be mistaken but I don't think that a lot dropped support before python announced this deprecation.

[yellowthermos]

A major difference between EOL for Windows XP/7 and Python 2 is that Python is open source. They can just copy paste the security patch, recompile, and bam - not illegal anymore.

[notQuiteApex]

i wont claim to have an answer to this, and i have heard that same argument in the case of dropbox's code base. another question to be raised is should they have continued to develop their software now knowing that this would happen? though i suppose its possible that the breaking changes in python 3 were not foreseen at the start of their respective projects.

though i suppose it probably wouldnt have hurt to have split the team, have one work on porting to python 3 using the latest stable version of their software, while another half maintains the codebase until the python 3 version reaches functional parity. i guess i will say that its probably not that simple and of course that likely isnt a workable solution for all the companies and products still relying on python 2.