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Python 2 removed from Debian

bugs.debian.org

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Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#301

Post by onphonenow »

traceroute66 wrote: post #282
onphonenow wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The python maintainers went out of their way to break things - and were smug about it. That’s what it felt like to the community. A big part of 3 was Unicode strings. In 2 you could mark a string as Unicode with a u””. This would have been a great way to let libraries and code work with both 2 and 3. They banned this, but you had to still use b””. This was the attitude and just one example. The list of stuff that got…

> The python maintainers went out of their way to break things - and were smug about it. That’s what it felt like to the community. The other side of that coin is that the python maintainers went out of their way to push back the Python 2 EOL. They kept on pushing the date back and back again, as per the sunset page: "We did not want to hurt the people using Python 2. So, in 2008, we announced that we would sunset Py…

If they hadn’t extended there was talk of actually forking python. Basically people needed a 2.x compatible python, and most features being put into 3 could have been backported. So you’d maybe keep u””, keep print, add futures stuff for folks targeting both and then pull in 3 stuff to reduce pressure to move. They were smart not to drop 2 cold.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#302

Post by leephillips »

tolmasky wrote: post #286

As someone who does not use Python , the end result of this is that I now look into whether random utilities I use happen to be written in Python, and if so try to find an alternative. This is because I felt the pain of this transition -- again, as someone who does not program in Python. It has been miserable every time some random utility starts complaining that Python 3 is missing and then somehow when you install…

I agree completely, plus there are all the conflicting ways of installing and managing Python programs, dependencies, and environments, and the poor quality of so much Python code, some of it widely used. I find myself having to switch the `python` symlink in my path between python2 and python3 regularly, I look forward to the day when I can purge my systems of all traces of Python.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#303

Post by tolmasky »

Waterluvian wrote: post #296
tolmasky wrote: post #286

As someone who does not use Python , the end result of this is that I now look into whether random utilities I use happen to be written in Python, and if so try to find an alternative. This is because I felt the pain of this transition -- again, as someone who does not program in Python. It has been miserable every time some random utility starts complaining that Python 3 is missing and then somehow when you install…

I’m curious why installing Python 3 causes Python 2 programs to break. The only reason I can come up with is that the installation process is wrongly changing the `Python` symlink. Anyone have other known causes? Does it screw with dependencies?

It is hard to keep track of the (no joke) dozens of different weird failures each unique instance of this caused. But I do vaguely recall that sometimes, yes, you now have to go and point each individual utility at the right Python, or set an environment variable, or something. Other times you are relying on some combined build package, which if you want the one that has Python 3, no longer includes Python 2. So then you have to go manually install it. But it's no longer provided as an independent install by that package manager anymore, it was just a coincidence that it was still being included in buildpacks-whatever, so now you have to decide whether you want to figure out how to find and install Python 2 yourself or maybe just go and update everything else to Python 3 too or... UGH. Then you remember "Wait a minute, why I am I doing this, I'm not even a Python programmer!"

The worst part is a lot of times, since Python 3 is a breaking change, people decide that it's a great time to finally do all their breaking API changes too, so all of a sudden updating something to the Python 3 version means that all of its associated config files have changed format, and now you're updating config files that have worked great for ages and running into bugs there.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#304

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

#305

Post by ironmagma »

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.

> Assume good faith.

I tried using the library less than a year ago. I must have missed something. This would be great news… if the way you told me didn’t make me feel like shit.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#306

Post by jcranmer »

tsimionescu wrote: post #179
maxnoe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The removal of implicit conversion between bytes and strings via ascii did not introduce bugs, it showed were you already had bugs that you maybe did not yet notice.

That's only true if you ever received Unicode input. There are plenty of uses of strings that never do - enums, DNS domain names, URLs, HTTP parsing, email addresses (from any sane provider) etc.

Even a decade ago, you would have needed to support Unicode if you handled any of those strings. IDN domain names existed as far back as 2003, so unless you could guarantee that everything was in A-label form already, you would need to worry about that (which affects URLs and email addresses as well). URL paths might be Unicode if no one normalized it to percent-encoding first. And HTTP headers--like email headers--could well be non-ASCII despite the standard prohibiting unencoded non-ASCII text because the real world is full of shitty implementations that don't follow standards, and the internet community generally runs on the principle that it's better to force everybody else to try to make sense of the result than tell those people to fix their code.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#307

Post by [deleted] »

heinrichhartman wrote: post #220
mrweasel wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had crazy amounts of code handling unicode support and conversion from our ecommerce site to our ERP system (running on Windows using some Windows code page thing). With Python 3 all that went away, you can now just seamlessly parse text from one system to another. For me, the unicode handling alone was worth the time spend migrating from Python 2. That was a decade ago, to finding that the "python" command still…

> That was a decade ago, to finding that the "python" command still launches a Python 2.7 interpreter in 2023 is just beyond belief. The problem is not the end-user invoking the command. The problem is scrips expecting `#!/usr/bin/env python` to invoke python-2.

[deleted]

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#308

Post by rightbyte »

Nextgrid wrote: post #104
_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…

You shouldn’t be using the system-provided Python for anything except system-wide tools that can be packaged and marked dependent on the system Python package (and any Python packages which are packaged as system packages - don’t use “pip install” system-wide). The system-provided Python is mostly there to support system packages/tools that happen to be written in Python. Stand-alone applications should use pyenv/ven…

> You shouldn’t be using the system-provided Python for anything except system-wide tools

That does not sound like a user friendly programming language.

The version compatibility of Python is a joke and has been after 2.7 to 3 to. Which is the main reason I don't use Python for anything but bash-like scripts.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#309

Post by marssaxman »

k__ wrote: post #252
qbasic_forever wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guido has done some pycon keynotes in the recent past and said himself he takes some of the blame for the transition. He says he greatly underestimated the impact of breaking changes and the inertia to get the community to change code. In particular not shipping tools to help automate the migration, or even thinking through a migration path with targeted backwards compatibility/back ports from the start (these eventu…

Codemods aren't a thing in Python?

What is a "codemod"?

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#310

Post by pnt12 »

sovietmudkipz wrote: post #246

When (if?) the dust settles, I'd love to watch a technology focused documentary to hear the historic retelling of all the python 2 to 3 events. It started before I started programming, I don't program in python much, and thus I don't have a ton of context. If anyone has any good resources I could browse that might help me understand the full story feel free to share.

My 2 cents: I learned python 2 in 2015 or so because I was recommended "Learn python the hard way", whose author defended python2 with a passion.

So I started with python 2 and found the book crap. The author's idea of teaching is telling others to repeat an exercise a hundred times with all possible variations. There were more than a dozen about printing stuff to a terminal, before you got into any interesting stuff.

From their website, although they added a new course and book for python 3, they are still selling the ones for python 2. Still selling stuff for a version killed 3 years ago requires some fucking audacity.

Later I learned python 3 from other source and loved it. It's what I mostly program with today.

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