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Python 2 removed from Debian

bugs.debian.org

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Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#61

Post by rich_sasha »

bmitc wrote: post #19
nibbleshifter wrote: post #7

print "goodbye, sweet prince" I've been slowly porting a lot of my legacy code from 2 to 3 on an as-needed basis, there's a few bits though that are just too huge/crusty/etc that they will never get ported.

Doesn't this say something about the language if it's been so difficult for people to migrate from 2 to 3? Yes, it was a major version change, but it doesn't bode well for arguments that Python is a good language to do long-term, maintainable, and large-scale development. Sure, now things are "settled" with 3, but Python continues to get more features. It just doesn't look good for the language if even doing a langua…

I think that's missing the point a little.

The actual migration should you choose to do it was almost trivial. The official conversion script did most if not all the work. The changes were all cosmetic, like "print 42" changing to "print(42)".

I'd say the uproar was about the minorness itself. The syntax had these tiny but otherwise incompatible changes, and for many people, for no good reason. Fo example it was deemed that, as in the example above, print shall not be a statement anymore, but a function instead. Why? Unclear. Meanwhile, Python 3 offered few concrete improvements to many users

So I think the 2->3 moan, of which I was a party, was about that: minor, unnecessary changes that introduced little to no benefit, and yet backwards-incompatible.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#62

Post by kasabali »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #55
whirlwin wrote: post #44

As mentioned by several people already, the migration process from 2 to 3 was really painful. It will be easier for the Python core maintainers, but introducing a breaking change with the intent that that version 2 will be deprecated has probably caused more distress overall, especially maintainers of other open source projects which rely on a specific python version. Let's never have the same kind of breaking change…

> It will be easier for the Python core maintainers, [...] It wasn't not even that easy, to be frank. 2to3 is not a small project [1] and they had (alas, incorrectly) assumed that there were enough people to have enough tests to be benefited from 2to3, only to be found massively wrong. In hindsight no one had a good idea about language evolution; the modern concensus is a single interpreter supporting multiple parall…

> first major language with this approach was ECMAScript 2009 (5th ed.)

Not that I've any proof but I kind of find it hard to believe there were no other examples before

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#63

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

_8j50 wrote: post #58

This really sucks but at least pyenv exists. Basically distros care so little about their users we have to use external tools to use python2. "Everyone has has a chance to migrate" . Doesn't work that way, just yesterday I spent a few hours trying to get scripts that are really good and would take me forever to migrate that are in python2 to work on an ubuntu based distro and this is with pyenv, custom venv,etc... ju…

> Do you all know why 2023 will not be the year of the Linux desktop? Because desktops are a commercial market and consumers/users cannot sway what the Linux desktop experience is.

And... you believe that Microsoft and Apple are swayed by users? More than Red Hat and Canonical? I don't buy that for one second.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#64

Post by noobermin »

bmitc wrote: post #19
nibbleshifter wrote: post #7

print "goodbye, sweet prince" I've been slowly porting a lot of my legacy code from 2 to 3 on an as-needed basis, there's a few bits though that are just too huge/crusty/etc that they will never get ported.

Doesn't this say something about the language if it's been so difficult for people to migrate from 2 to 3? Yes, it was a major version change, but it doesn't bode well for arguments that Python is a good language to do long-term, maintainable, and large-scale development. Sure, now things are "settled" with 3, but Python continues to get more features. It just doesn't look good for the language if even doing a langua…

And yet it says a lot that people stayed, I'm not sure it says whether the python 3 move was necessary more than it says something about developers in general.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#65

Post by kazinator »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #55
whirlwin wrote: post #44

As mentioned by several people already, the migration process from 2 to 3 was really painful. It will be easier for the Python core maintainers, but introducing a breaking change with the intent that that version 2 will be deprecated has probably caused more distress overall, especially maintainers of other open source projects which rely on a specific python version. Let's never have the same kind of breaking change…

> It will be easier for the Python core maintainers, [...] It wasn't not even that easy, to be frank. 2to3 is not a small project [1] and they had (alas, incorrectly) assumed that there were enough people to have enough tests to be benefited from 2to3, only to be found massively wrong. In hindsight no one had a good idea about language evolution; the modern concensus is a single interpreter supporting multiple parall…

The idea of compilers and interpreters providing backward compatibility options to support programs written using older dialects did not originate in Javascript.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#66

Post by a2800276 »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
a2800276 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are doing scientific computing or using Windows in which case you should use anaconda. Oh and if you are on a Mac you you use brew if you want to install things like tensorflow or imagemagick etc. You see there's only one thing to do it TM :)

Anaconda works very well on Linux.

I agree. Yet still most people doing scientific computing will end up with 17 installations on their system. I was just being facetious about the state of package management :)

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#67

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

justin_oaks wrote: post #46
jacquesm wrote: post #4

And not a decade too soon. The Python 2 -> Python 3 migration will be studied for a long time as an example how not to release a new version of your language or library, right next to that Angular thingy. The number of headaches I've had to deal with because of this over the years have just about soured me on the whole Python offering, and I used to be a pretty big fan. Great that Debian finally pulls the plug on it,…

Forgive my ignorance, but what should have been done instead of the way the Python 2 to 3 migration happened? I know that Python 2 has stuck around for far longer than anyone wanted and that people were (are?) hesitant to migrate from 2 to 3, but I'm not sure what decisions contributed to that.

IMHO: Early versions of Python 3 were outright inferior, and IIRC couldn't handle raw bytes, because "everything should be Unicode". Except, not everything is Unicode. So people went to port, and couldn't. This compounded a problem with libraries, to create a situation where transitioning was risky. Better yet, eventually the Python devs decreed that everyone should move already... so they were going to stop making new 2.x feature releases, and only issue big fixes. But to the folks already hesitant to change, that sounded a lot like "Python 2 will be super Stable for forever".

So IMO, basically what should have happened is accounting for valid use of features that 3 wanted to kill, and actually offering a path forward, from day one, so everyone could do a migration and actually have it work.

Edit: Also (but connected), 3.0 (and IIRC a couple thereafter) should have been marked as release candidates, because they were.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#68

Post by YetAnotherNick »

justin_oaks wrote: post #46
jacquesm wrote: post #4

And not a decade too soon. The Python 2 -> Python 3 migration will be studied for a long time as an example how not to release a new version of your language or library, right next to that Angular thingy. The number of headaches I've had to deal with because of this over the years have just about soured me on the whole Python offering, and I used to be a pretty big fan. Great that Debian finally pulls the plug on it,…

Forgive my ignorance, but what should have been done instead of the way the Python 2 to 3 migration happened? I know that Python 2 has stuck around for far longer than anyone wanted and that people were (are?) hesitant to migrate from 2 to 3, but I'm not sure what decisions contributed to that.

I think the biggest issue was that they named the executable same. They backported few things from python 3 to 2.7, and recommended to use `sys.version_info` and `__future__` for making code run in both python. If they said they would never rename python3 executable to python and python3 is not python, it would have been easier for everyone.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#69

Post by estebank »

gurustave wrote: post #57
bmitc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this say something about the language if it's been so difficult for people to migrate from 2 to 3? Yes, it was a major version change, but it doesn't bode well for arguments that Python is a good language to do long-term, maintainable, and large-scale development. Sure, now things are "settled" with 3, but Python continues to get more features. It just doesn't look good for the language if even doing a langua…

Probably not. Java is going through the same exact thing with Java 8 right now. The issue is that humans don't plan ahead for when the software they use inevitably goes EOL, be it programming languages, libraries, or operating systems, and so only really do so when forced (sometimes only after a security incident). In the case of Python 2 and Java 8, the problem was/has been exacerbated by the organization supporting…

> So why would anyone decide, much less how would one justify to a corporate overlord, to spend all the time and resources to refactor their code, upgrade libraries (assuming the libraries themselves upgrade), update build systems, perform extensive regression testing, and everything else, just for a version that would be EOL one year after what they just upgraded from?

The longer you delay upgrades, the bigger the delta, the more work it will be to update. Instead of doing two medium sized updates, one today and another one in 2030, you'll be doing a huge one in 2030. That might be a trade off you might be willing to make today, but you might regret it in 2029 when you're halfway through a multiyear migration project where all feature work is on hold.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#70

Post by m463 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #50

Glad this is finally mostly over, but... that was bad. I wonder if the energy that had to be put into this migration by everyone involved was worth what seems to be relatively small improvements. The print-as-a-statement was ugly but convenient and didn't seem like a big deal, the integer division was something that you could live with once you knew about it (and you still need to know what the current behavior is),…

strings, bytes, utf-8 and more have continued to stymie me while converting code over.
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