Everyone complained, no one addressed the fact that for years the whole of python packaging was handled by like 2.5 people. But as a rant this, like most of the ‘but just fix it’ rants, fails to acknowledge the hugely diverging needs of different users. I could not live without conda, since it’s the only sane way to get a working recent geospatial stack. Others need to run embedded environments, or portable ones, som…
> Everyone complained, no one addressed the fact that for years the whole of python packaging was handled by like 2.5 people. If I can make an observation - it has nothing to do with the number of maintainers. The problem is deep, cultural and occupies a difficult space where it might be a bug or a feature. The root cause here is that the Python project, and surrounding community, have little real respect for backwar…
The Python project went absolutely above and beyond to support users who wanted to drag out making not particularly complex changes to their codebase for over a decade.
During this same time they improved Python 3 in response to feedback and among other effects, made it less different and easier to port, from Python 2.
Many common packages supported 2.7 up to its end-of-life as well.
One of the reasons that Python is often a source of compatibility errors is that both distros and large standalone applications embraced Python in the early 2000s, became dependent on a particular version, and then refused to work with newer versions.
Python is not responsible for all the engineering decisions everyone writing in the language has ever made.