Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sunsetting Python 2

python.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 733 posts

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#11

Post by tonyedgecombe »

marsokod wrote: post #4
coldtea wrote: post #3

> If people find catastrophic security problems in Python 2, or in software written in Python 2, then volunteers will not help you. If you need help with Python 2 software, then volunteers will not help you. Well, isn't it the benefit of FOSS, that volunteers can, and in the case of such a critical piece, so much used as Python 2, in all probability will, step up. Doesn't have to be the same people as the core team i…

No, the benefit of FOSS is that if the group developing a product does not support it anymore, you are free to fork it and support it yourself. And I am sure we will see a fair share of people doing that. What I am not sure is of anyone doing so will have the shoulders to actually support it. Python 2.7 was released 1 decade ago. That's quite a long transition time.

I wonder if they would have saved themselves five years of grief if they had done this five years ago.

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#12

Post by Teknoman117 »

leejo wrote: post #8
mrweasel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't believe that many will step up and take over. Many will complain, but few will do the actual work. Even if it's just security fixes, there's still the process of testing and release management, and honestly, I don't blame the core Python team for no longer wanting to do release management of both Python 2 and 3.

> Many will complain, but few will do the actual work. That's opensource in a nutshell. If there are any big shops stuck on Python 2 then they will probably throw a resource or two at this. If there are big dists using Python 2 they will do the same.

From what I can tell, even Google is moving to python 3 (some of their previously python 2 only tools (like repo) have gained ‘experimental’ python 3 support) this year, so they’re probably not going to be doing the work.

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#13

Post by goto11 »

coldtea wrote: post #3

> If people find catastrophic security problems in Python 2, or in software written in Python 2, then volunteers will not help you. If you need help with Python 2 software, then volunteers will not help you. Well, isn't it the benefit of FOSS, that volunteers can, and in the case of such a critical piece, so much used as Python 2, in all probability will, step up. Doesn't have to be the same people as the core team i…

Volunteers can of course step up, nothing is preventing anybody. But you shouldn't expect it will happen. Why would anybody voluntarily work on fixing bugs in obsolete software?

People getting paid to work on Python (like at Red Hat) are not considered volunteers.

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#15

Post by Scarblac »

coldtea wrote: post #3

> If people find catastrophic security problems in Python 2, or in software written in Python 2, then volunteers will not help you. If you need help with Python 2 software, then volunteers will not help you. Well, isn't it the benefit of FOSS, that volunteers can, and in the case of such a critical piece, so much used as Python 2, in all probability will, step up. Doesn't have to be the same people as the core team i…

They did step up, even extended the time they were planning to step up by years, but it has to end somewhere.

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#16

Post by markdown »

Animats wrote: post #7

Some shared hosting providers are still offering Python 2.6 as their main offering.[1] Optionally, there's Python 3.2, probably the worst 3.x version. [1] https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/what-software-and-pro...

> Shared hosting providers

Like Google App Engine lol. GAE Standard Environment doesn't support Python 3.

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#17

Post by jasoncartwright »

markdown wrote: post #16
Animats wrote: post #7

Some shared hosting providers are still offering Python 2.6 as their main offering.[1] Optionally, there's Python 3.2, probably the worst 3.x version. [1] https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/what-software-and-pro...

> Shared hosting providers Like Google App Engine lol. GAE Standard Environment doesn't support Python 3.

This is incorrect. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python3/

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#18

Post by d--b »

Ugh? Many systems still run COBOL today. Python 2 is likely to be around for a long time. Since the stuff is open source, wouldn't it be nicer if it was possible to fix a bug if needed? Not saying that it should be actively worked on. But maybe one person could be appointed to look over bug fix pull requests (which shouldn't be that frequent these days).

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#19

Post by kuu »

I don't think the main problem is to change the version of Python, but the version of all the related libraries, which many of them depend on 2.7 version.

I know many of the big ones are already on 3.x for a long time, but I wonder how long will it take to replace and upgrade all the small ones if it did not happen already...

BTW I don't know how necessary was to break compatibility between 2.7 and 3, the pain of this transition comes from that decision

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#20

Post by tobr »

I don't have a stake in this and don't know much about the background, so pardon if this comment is out of touch. Is this the first notice of this date? January 1 is just 16 weeks away, which seems like an awfully short notice for ending security updates of a very popular language.

EDIT: I see now that they mention that 2020 has been the plan since 2014, which seems reasonable.

Post reply on HN