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If you just had an issue with their content, you could have said soI did. I did not think I needed an argument to ask you to stop bringing such an incredibly negative attitude to the table.
> You don't know what I've paid
I was referring to Django, to be clear. And whatever you've paid, it's in donations -- that's great! But if you want to see support, you'll need to directly pay people to maintain that support. I believe in fact you yourself said that before, here on HN, about other tech.
> The community of a language's users can, and do, have an opinion on its progress and the changes that happen to it
"as long as that opinion is the same as mine", right?
I mean, here is one of your comments for example:
> Some of us have 10+ years of codebases to maintain, and we don't care for Python 3 features
This is basically saying "I do not care for python 3 features, therefore Python 2 should continue being supported even longer [because I have an old codebase to maintain]".
The argument in a nutshell is that because the transition is hard, the Python team should just give up on the transition and support both. It's an argument I've heard before. The reason it doesn't hold water is because doing so would completely kill the language, for good.
We all, as the python community, collectively admitted that the Python 3 transition was awful. It still is pretty bad, although it has improved a lot. Could still be better! But now, we're on the final stretch and the remaining complaints are from people in similar situations as you: Large Python 2 codebase to maintain, therefore can't switch, therefore "please give us more time, and by more time I mean just forget Python 3 ever happened and come back".
Another place I've heard that argument is back when IE6 went EOL. And went EOL again. And a third time for good measure. And then MS had to declare it dead for good. It was holding the web back and we've been better since. We had the same sort of people back then, asking for "more time", "more leeway", "more support" and "please add ActiveX back to the web we promise we'll switch eventually". Do I need to give an argument why that didn't hold water then either?
I am sorry that you have to deal with that. It sucks. I've been in this position before (different language) and back then, FWIW, we bit the bullet and we migrated. It sucked for two months, and then it didn't. The longer we'd have waited, the longer it would have sucked. I can only recommend you do the same; it's a good long term investment.
At the end of the day, you can try to pull all the numbers you want, the Python team isn't going to suddenly go back on the plan they've been making very clear and insisted on for several years now. Because it would be a betrayal to the rest of the Python community and would severely harm the language and its future. I do believe it's extremely selfish of you at this point to ask that they cater to the group you happen to be a part of, rather than the overall good of the community.