[Python-Dev] Future of 2.x. (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Wed Jun 9 19:41:47 CEST 2010

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 08:12, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Jun 09, 2010, at 04:42 PM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

Many of them are not keen on having to maintain Python2 for much longer, but some of them may have assets codified in Python2 or interests based Python2 that they'll want to keep for more than just another 5 years.

E.g. we still have customers that are on Python 2.3 and have just recently considered moving to Python 2.5. Depending on where you look, motivations are rather diverse. It's certainly not fair to require all core developers to continue working on Python2, but it would also be unfair to cancel out that possibility for a subset of interested devs. Even more so, since it doesn't really create any extra work for those that have no interest. Note that Python 2.7 will be maintained for a very long time, which should satisfy those folks who still require Python 2.  Anybody on older (and currently unmaintained) versions of Python 2 will not care about new features so a Python 2.8 wouldn't help them anyway.

The other point about Alexandre's desire to close the issues is that nothing is really getting deleted; closed issues can still be searched for. Alexandre simply wants to not waste anyone's time who happens to be looking at the tracker with issues that the core team will simply never work on. If some mythical 2.8 fork of Python comes along they can perform a search and find the issues that were closed because they were backports that never happened.

So +1 on closing them out.

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