[Python-Dev] The end of 2.7 (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Apr 8 02:59:18 CEST 2013

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 12:58 AM, Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org> wrote:

You're not looking at it from the users perspective. They see:

"we are pleased to announce that RHEL 4 will be supported until the year 3325" and continue to use everything that it ships with and only that. its their own loss for not investing in maintaining infrastructure of their own rather than investing in a support contract from their vendor but it is a valid choice none the less. it has nothing to do with what python-dev chooses to do release wise.

Right, people pay companies like Red Hat* good money to support ancient versions of open source software. Upstream doesn't want to do that (because it's tedious and not at all interesting), and they don't have to. If people want things that volunteers aren't interested in providing, then they have the option to pay to get the software they want on the platforms they want (note that in the later parts of a supported product's life, even we don't support running ancient versions of RHEL directly on new hardware - we only support running it as a VM inside a supported hypervisor that supports the new hardware).

We don't need to close the 2.7 branch to commits and bug fixes. Ever. But most of us will stop caring about making changes to it at some point.

+1000

For me that point is after 3.4.

In terms of most of the stuff I work on that isn't a new feature, it's either obscure enough, different enough between 2.x and 3.x or close enough to the "new feature" line that I don't really care about getting it changed in 2.7. So for me personally, the "stop worrying about fixing 2.7" point is mostly passed already (fixing aspects of the 2.7 ecosystem is still thoroughly on my radar, but that's about improving external tools, not CPython itself).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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