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Guess the community (or a company like RedHat) will have to step in and fork 2.7. There is no way that people who haven't switched, will want to switch, unless

Guess the community (or a company like RedHat) will have to step in and fork 2.7. There is no way that people who haven't switched, will want to switch, unless absolutely forced to (for example: no security patches).

guitarbill 9y ago
This old chestnut. Yeah, if there's enough people who are willing to pay for it (time or money), sure, Python 2.7 support will continue. I just hope those same people have used the past years to do calculate the cost of moving to Python 3 vs the cost of Python 2 support. Expecting Python 2 support to be free or even easy is delusional/selfish though.
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  Pffft. Nice strawman. Who said it would be free or easy? Expecting that everyone will just hop over Python 3 because one group of people doesn't want to maintain Python 2 anymore is delusional.
  - kstrauser 9y ago
    At some point a CFO will ask why a company is spending $X to use ancient, unhireable versions of their tools when new, free, attractive versions exist. It will be explained - not exactly in these words - that it's basically because their senior devs refuse to learn new stuff. Senior management arguments will ensue. At the end, there will be a plan to save $X with One Simple Trick. Displaced senior devs will find themselves making nice paychecks at other shops with obsolete codebases, at least until those CFOs start to notice a funny line item in the engineering budget...
    - hungerstrike 9y ago
      Python 3 has been out for how long? None of this has happened yet. What is going to make 2.7 so unmaintainable? It’s there, it works and what is going to change that?
      - kstrauser 9y ago
        Python 2.7 is currently supported. It's not a great idea, but at least defensible, to still be developing against it today. But the moment it becomes officially obsolete and shops have to justify paying special support contracts to maintain it, I think it'll become very hard to explain why that's a good business decision. There are valid reasons for using 2.7 today. I think it's professional negligence to not at least be planning for the inevitable upgrade to the current version. Honestly, it's almost never as hard as you'd think. The most common hurdles are str/bytes incompatibility, and 3.x only reveals those problems where they already exist in 2.x (where the code is quite possibly not working as expected but silently passing wrong data without warning you).
        hungerstrike 9y ago
        > But the moment it becomes officially obsolete and shops have to justify paying special support contracts to maintain it... Who even pays for a support contract for programming language that’s already done? That’s like saying JavaScript is unusable because of all of the different versions. Nobody has to pay anybody to use ES3 even though it’s largely obsolete.
      - guitarbill 9y ago
        Python 3 has been out since December 2008, so 9 years. It's easy to forget that Python 2 was supposed to have been deprecated in 2015, but that got pushed back until 2020. Personally, I don't feel like backporting security fixes forever.
ceronman 9y ago
I can see a company providing 2.7 support afterwards. I'm not sure if RedHat, but if there is demand, I totally see 2.7 support as a viable business, at least for awhile. I think it's unlikely that the community will bring support. Most of the community already jumped to 3.x, and those who haven't will do in the next two years. Also, supporting legacy code is not something that volunteers love to do.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  > supporting legacy code is not something that volunteers love to do. And this is perhaps the Achilles heel of FOSS in the long run...
Lev1a 9y ago
Like with any other system where some old version just won't go away, the ones who absolutely will not switch to Python 3 will eventually (literally) go extinct. What we can do, as the people who live in the present, is educate programming/python newbies to use the newer/better Python 3, instead of clinging to something that will soon lose official support (for AFAIK good reasons).
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Like with any other system where some old version just won't go away, the ones who absolutely will not switch to Python 3 will eventually (literally) go extinct. And yet there are tons of lines on COBOL in active use today. What makes you think 2.7 code, which powers tons of businesses, is going anywhere?
  - Lev1a 9y ago
    At some point in the future the cost of maintenance vs. cost of rewriting/upgrading will be so much in favor of the latter that businesses will make the (correct) choice to "go with the times" instead of spending an ever increasing amount of money and time on maintaining a code base `x` years old written in a language not officially supported/extended for `y` years, experts for which are increasingly rare (and thus expensive).
    - coldtea 9y ago
      If they can find Cobol experts 50+ years after the original programs were written, they'll have no issue finding 2.7 experts 50+ years on, especially since 3 and 2.7 and more alike than different.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yeukhon 9y ago
Has RedHat ever forked Python from 2.3 all the way to 2.6?
stefantalpalaru 9y ago
> Guess the community (or a company like RedHat) will have to step in and fork 2.7. Already done: https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/ https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/
cesarb 9y ago
I expect RedHat to continue to support Python 2.7 for as long as major RHEL versions which came with are still under support. I also expect major RHEL versions released after Python 2.7 is EOL to not come with Python 2.7 anymore. That is, if RHEL 8 is released before the Python 2.7 EOL, and RHEL 9 is released after the Python 2.7 EOL, I expect RHEL 8 to come with both Python 2.7 and Python 3, with RedHat supporting both until RHEL 8 support ends, but RHEL 9 to come with only Python 3; so once RHEL 8 dies, RedHat has no reason to support Python 2.7 anymore.
- mkesper 9y ago
  But they cannot support the whole Python environment for Python2. Many projects (django etc.) drop Python2 support after April 2020.

guitarbill 9y ago

This old chestnut. Yeah, if there's enough people who are willing to pay for it (time or money), sure, Python 2.7 support will continue. I just hope those same people have used the past years to do calculate the cost of moving to Python 3 vs the cost of Python 2 support. Expecting Python 2 support to be free or even easy is delusional/selfish though.

hungerstrike 9y ago
Pffft. Nice strawman. Who said it would be free or easy? Expecting that everyone will just hop over Python 3 because one group of people doesn't want to maintain Python 2 anymore is delusional.
- kstrauser 9y ago
  At some point a CFO will ask why a company is spending $X to use ancient, unhireable versions of their tools when new, free, attractive versions exist. It will be explained - not exactly in these words - that it's basically because their senior devs refuse to learn new stuff. Senior management arguments will ensue. At the end, there will be a plan to save $X with One Simple Trick. Displaced senior devs will find themselves making nice paychecks at other shops with obsolete codebases, at least until those CFOs start to notice a funny line item in the engineering budget...
  - hungerstrike 9y ago
    Python 3 has been out for how long? None of this has happened yet. What is going to make 2.7 so unmaintainable? It’s there, it works and what is going to change that?
    - kstrauser 9y ago
      Python 2.7 is currently supported. It's not a great idea, but at least defensible, to still be developing against it today. But the moment it becomes officially obsolete and shops have to justify paying special support contracts to maintain it, I think it'll become very hard to explain why that's a good business decision. There are valid reasons for using 2.7 today. I think it's professional negligence to not at least be planning for the inevitable upgrade to the current version. Honestly, it's almost never as hard as you'd think. The most common hurdles are str/bytes incompatibility, and 3.x only reveals those problems where they already exist in 2.x (where the code is quite possibly not working as expected but silently passing wrong data without warning you).
      - hungerstrike 9y ago
        > But the moment it becomes officially obsolete and shops have to justify paying special support contracts to maintain it... Who even pays for a support contract for programming language that’s already done? That’s like saying JavaScript is unusable because of all of the different versions. Nobody has to pay anybody to use ES3 even though it’s largely obsolete.
    - guitarbill 9y ago
      Python 3 has been out since December 2008, so 9 years. It's easy to forget that Python 2 was supposed to have been deprecated in 2015, but that got pushed back until 2020. Personally, I don't feel like backporting security fixes forever.

ceronman 9y ago

I can see a company providing 2.7 support afterwards. I'm not sure if RedHat, but if there is demand, I totally see 2.7 support as a viable business, at least for awhile. I think it's unlikely that the community will bring support. Most of the community already jumped to 3.x, and those who haven't will do in the next two years. Also, supporting legacy code is not something that volunteers love to do.

digi_owl 9y ago
> supporting legacy code is not something that volunteers love to do. And this is perhaps the Achilles heel of FOSS in the long run...

Lev1a 9y ago

Like with any other system where some old version just won't go away, the ones who absolutely will not switch to Python 3 will eventually (literally) go extinct. What we can do, as the people who live in the present, is educate programming/python newbies to use the newer/better Python 3, instead of clinging to something that will soon lose official support (for AFAIK good reasons).

coldtea 9y ago
>Like with any other system where some old version just won't go away, the ones who absolutely will not switch to Python 3 will eventually (literally) go extinct. And yet there are tons of lines on COBOL in active use today. What makes you think 2.7 code, which powers tons of businesses, is going anywhere?
- Lev1a 9y ago
  At some point in the future the cost of maintenance vs. cost of rewriting/upgrading will be so much in favor of the latter that businesses will make the (correct) choice to "go with the times" instead of spending an ever increasing amount of money and time on maintaining a code base `x` years old written in a language not officially supported/extended for `y` years, experts for which are increasingly rare (and thus expensive).
  - coldtea 9y ago
    If they can find Cobol experts 50+ years after the original programs were written, they'll have no issue finding 2.7 experts 50+ years on, especially since 3 and 2.7 and more alike than different.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

yeukhon 9y ago

Has RedHat ever forked Python from 2.3 all the way to 2.6?

stefantalpalaru 9y ago

> Guess the community (or a company like RedHat) will have to step in and fork 2.7. Already done: https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/ https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/

cesarb 9y ago

I expect RedHat to continue to support Python 2.7 for as long as major RHEL versions which came with are still under support. I also expect major RHEL versions released after Python 2.7 is EOL to not come with Python 2.7 anymore. That is, if RHEL 8 is released before the Python 2.7 EOL, and RHEL 9 is released after the Python 2.7 EOL, I expect RHEL 8 to come with both Python 2.7 and Python 3, with RedHat supporting both until RHEL 8 support ends, but RHEL 9 to come with only Python 3; so once RHEL 8 dies, RedHat has no reason to support Python 2.7 anymore.

mkesper 9y ago
But they cannot support the whole Python environment for Python2. Many projects (django etc.) drop Python2 support after April 2020.