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Python 2 removed from Debian

bugs.debian.org

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Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#161

Post by tick_tock_tick »

gspetr wrote: post #56
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),…

IMO you're oversimplifying things without appreciating the scope of what went into Python 3. Core developer Brett Cannon's talk "Python 3.3: Trust Me, It's Better than 2.7" goes over most of the differences at the time (2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_6vDi7ywuA

Unless I'm missing something what in here supposed to justify a decade of pain? Hell most of it could have been easily done in python 2 and slowly via warning and errors transition codebases.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#162

Post by rc00 »

sherr wrote: post #133

It was a bit of a shock when I upgraded my Debian systems to Bullseye (11) from Buster (10) a year or so ago. I discovered that the wiki I've been using for years, Moin Moin, was removed because it didn't support Python 3. I've a lot in the wiki and was in no position to migrate, so I made a wiki only VM and keep it at "oldstable". Since none of it is internet-facing, I can keep it this was forever, even once all sup…

I had a VM with MediaWiki way back when and I was able to convert it to markdown and a private GitHub repository pretty easily with pandoc. I'm not familiar with Moin Moin but maybe there's a conversion tool you can use to do the same thing?

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#163

Post by [deleted] »

oefrha wrote: post #159
ironmagma wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I mean personally the only thing that would keep me in the community is wxPython, which AFAIK still only supports Py2.

The last wxPython release that even supported py27 was from close to three years ago, and you would have known if you spent half a minute looking into it before making an absurd claim.

[deleted]

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#164

Post by forgotpwd16 »

p-e-w wrote: post #88
gspetr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO you're oversimplifying things without appreciating the scope of what went into Python 3. Core developer Brett Cannon's talk "Python 3.3: Trust Me, It's Better than 2.7" goes over most of the differences at the time (2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_6vDi7ywuA

> "Python 3.3: Trust Me, It's Better than 2.7" The fact that such a talk exists shows that the improvements aren't worth the switch for most users. If they were, they wouldn't need convincing. Yes, Python 3 is (mostly) better than Python 2. No, it's not even remotely worth the amount of confusion and work it caused. If Python 3 had brought massive performance improvements, or proper support for multiple threads, then…

>The fact that such a talk exists shows that the improvements aren't worth the switch for most users.

More like it shows that many people like GP are only aware of the superficial changes.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#165

Post by maxbond »

dontlaugh wrote: post #152
justin_oaks wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They should have made the Python 3 interpreter able to embed the Python 2 interpreter. It would’ve then been possible to mark projects as 3 while they continue to import 2 libraries.

This is similar to Rust's approach of using language "editions" separately from compiler versions (presumably because they learned from this migration).

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#166

Post by flohofwoe »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #111
groestl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering, is there work on how python 3's changes could have been promoted in smoother way?

An excellent question, how do you smoothly break compatibility?

Easy: Introduce breaking new version, but freeze and continue to support old versions (e.g. a python3 install should include the ability to fallback to python2). A real world example of this philosophy are the D3D APIs. Each new major D3D version had a completely new API, but old D3D versions are supported forever.

Python source files then somehow need to announce what python runtime version they expect.

Having to support old versions forever also should make the maintainers think twice before breaking compatibility again.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#167

Post by captainmuon »

jacquesm wrote: post #109
captainmuon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, for about every point I feel the opposite way :-). Python is an elegant language that hits the sweet spot where it is very expressive, and easy to do what you want, and at the same time has enough structure so you don't produce a mess all the time. The libraries are very powerful, but a lot of them are hacks. Numpy and Pandas totally rely on magic and overloading the array indexing operator. You can't express…

Interesting, and nice to have a contrasting datapoint. I do think that "The libraries are very powerful, but a lot of them are hacks. Numpy and Pandas totally rely on magic and overloading the array indexing operator. You can't express a problem the natural way or it will be slow, you have to think the numpy way. I find it especially confusing if you create expressions with numpy arrays. Am I operating on them elemen…

You are right, you can't separate the language and the libraries, and a language would profit if it had a way to express these abstractions better. But if you'd that kind of syntax the Python language I think it would become bloated.

I think I like Python, because coming from C, a lot of things that are tedious there are effortless in Python (Strings! Lists and dicts, libraries, and so on.)

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#168

Post by mattbillenstein »

p-e-w wrote: post #88
gspetr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO you're oversimplifying things without appreciating the scope of what went into Python 3. Core developer Brett Cannon's talk "Python 3.3: Trust Me, It's Better than 2.7" goes over most of the differences at the time (2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_6vDi7ywuA

> "Python 3.3: Trust Me, It's Better than 2.7" The fact that such a talk exists shows that the improvements aren't worth the switch for most users. If they were, they wouldn't need convincing. Yes, Python 3 is (mostly) better than Python 2. No, it's not even remotely worth the amount of confusion and work it caused. If Python 3 had brought massive performance improvements, or proper support for multiple threads, then…

That's a bit cynical since I think if we were still dealing with the issues python 3 fixed today, I'd be very disappointed in python overall.

And, the latest iterations of Python3 have real usability improvements - the error message improvements alone make development a lot nicer. And the perf improvements and jit coming I think in 3.13 will really make more people consider py3 for their new projects.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#169

Post by oefrha »

sherr wrote: post #133

It was a bit of a shock when I upgraded my Debian systems to Bullseye (11) from Buster (10) a year or so ago. I discovered that the wiki I've been using for years, Moin Moin, was removed because it didn't support Python 3. I've a lot in the wiki and was in no position to migrate, so I made a wiki only VM and keep it at "oldstable". Since none of it is internet-facing, I can keep it this was forever, even once all sup…

Just make a container for it and you can run as many of them as you like without VM overhead.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#170

Post by xdennis »

yen223 wrote: post #122
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…

I see people saying that the migration was painful, but my own experience with two separate Python 2->3 migrations were so smooth they might as well have been a minor version bumps. I don't know where this discrepancy comes from.

It was easy if you were working on your own packages. It was quite difficult if you were dependent on external packages that had no plan to upgrade or if your company had internal packages which were Python 2-only and required in most services.
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