[Python-Dev] RFC: Backport ssl.MemoryBIO and ssl.SSLObject to Python 2.7 (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Thu Jun 1 15:51:28 EDT 2017

On 1 June 2017 at 17:14, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

Python 2 users include people on Windows who install it themselves, and then have no mechanism for automatic updates. They'll probably stay on whatever 2.7.x they first got, until something forces them to update. But it also includes people on stable Linux distros, where they have automatic updates provided by Red Hat or Debian or whomever, so a change like this WILL propagate - particularly (a) as the window is three entire years, and (b) if the change is considered important by the distro managers, which is a smaller group of people to convince than the users themselves.

However, it is trivial for Windows users to upgrade if asked to, as there's no issue around system packages depending on a particular version (or indeed, much of anything depending - 3rd party applications on Windows bundle their own Python, they don't use the globally installed one). So in principle, there should be no problem expecting Windows users to be on the latest version of 2.7.x. In fact, I suspect that the proportion of Windows users on Python 3 is noticeably higher than the proportion of Linux/Mac OS users on Python 3 (for the same reason). So this problem may overall be less pressing for Windows users. I have no evidence that isn't anecdotal to back this last assertion up, though.

Linux users often use the OS-supplied Python, and so getting the distributions to upgrade, and to backport upgrades to old versions of their OS and (push those backports as required updates) is the route to get the bulk of the users there. Experience on pip seems to indicate this is unlikely to happen, in practice. Mac OS users who use the system Python are, as I understand it, stuck with a pretty broken version (I don't know if newer versions of the OS change that). But distributions like Macports are more common and more up to date.

Apart from the Windows details, these are purely my impressions.

Do you have figures for how many people use pip on Windows vs Linux vs Mac OS?

No. But we do get plenty of bug reports from Windows users, so I don't think there's any reason to assume it's particularly low (given the relative numbers of python users - in fact, it may be proportionately higher as Windows users don't have alternative options like yum).

Paul

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