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Python 2 removed from Debian

bugs.debian.org

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Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#321

Post by spicybright »

cgeier wrote: post #262
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),…

For speakers of languages that cannot be written in ASCII-only, the importance of the improved unicode handling really cannot be overstated, especially for people new to programming.

Absolutely. Frankly, it's 2022. Putting some useful subset of unicode in is mostly a solved problem.

At least python3 got that right, unicode by default.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#322

Post by numpad0 »

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?

Maybe they should deprecate `python` -> /usr/bin/python3, assuming it's not way too late.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#323

Post by spicybright »

TylerE wrote: post #137
EdwardDiego wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be fragmented indefinitely, that claim might've carried some weight five years ago, but these days I see very few Python libraries that still support Python 2.7. And, if they do, it strongly implies that they've not been maintained for some time. (See also, a dependency on six) - with the caveat that sometimes you don't need to continually upgrade a library that fills its desired niche perfectly. Hell, if yo…

The people it lost are going to things other than python3.

Is that true? I have little data, but I'd imagine most are just working on small/mid size scripts that can be upgraded easily. There's really not many big projects your average joe will be coding in python, from what I've seen.

Where would they go from python? Node?

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#324

Post by hnfong »

nmstoker wrote: post #224

Having primarily used Python 3 since 2016 with some very specific (rare) exceptions and having found the switch remarkably pain free it's difficult to empathize with those still going on about this like it was massive, and yet there are major banks still struggling with the transition in key areas so there must be something. Is there a risk it becomes like one of those situations where certain people use a topic simp…

The lack of type checking and general runtime failures made the transition particularly difficult if you didn't have a bazillion unit tests covering all your large codebases.

I was lucky it didn't affect me much, but I could sympathize if somebody had hundreds of thousands of lines of python2 legacy code that needs to be migrated..

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#325

Post by wink »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #226
wink wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the one you replied to, but we were doing things mostly without strings (audio processing, stuff with bits) and python 2 worked perfectly fine. We had started this project as late as 2013 because the important libraries had not been ported yet and when the stuff wrapped up in 2017... I'm not sure if we could have switched by then. So personally I'm ok with Python 3 but I actually never ran into the described prob…

So not a single Cyrillic path in your INI or CSV files, or in the user input (CP_ANSI) to be printed onto the Windows console (CP_OEM, unless you’re in IDLE or redirecting the output, in which case CP_ANSI)? (The standard library’s CSV module was particularly atrocious at Unicode as I remember.) Not a single Chinese comment in your hardware descriptions? I envy you, but that’s a still a very specific corner of the wo…

We were working exclusively with filenames (and files) that we generated ourselves, moving them around in our own infrastructure, and writing all of our own configs, yes :P

I didn't insinuate that there weren't problems or that I wanted to keep Python 2 - just that it was perfectly normal to use it and not run into problems. I think I only remember a handful of encoding problems with my other python 2 adventures...

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#326

Post by danaris »

ilyt wrote: post #184
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

The changes Python made was made in Perl without breaking compatibility, you just wrote say use v5.24 in header to use given feature set (defaulted to something old to not break old stuff) The Py3 approach was terrible and wasted untold amount of hours just because you had to migrate everything, you couldn't just upgrade codebase piece by piece like in case of Perl. At the very least they should've just made new one…

Yes; and now we have to keep every version of Perl around in our package managers because they're all used by some code.

That's terrible practice.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#327

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

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…

It's not the other side of the coin, it's a direct consequence.

They had to push back the EOL because they screwed up.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#328

Post by nerdponx »

foolfoolz wrote: post #80
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),…

i think it’s clear this was a huge mistake. none of these changes were critical to pythons current success. python stalled for 10 years if not more because of these non-BC changes. it will fragmented indefinitely. this is a good case study of how one big ego can completely derail a massive project for decades

Can you explain how exactly Python stalled as a result?

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#329

Post by iforgotpassword »

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 wouldn't avoid a python program right from the start, but simply not bother if it actually wants 2 and only then start looking for an alternative. If anything that debian move might accelerate deprecation or upgrades of stuff that still uses 2. And then we might live in a perfect world with only python 3, because uuuuuunicooooode.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#330

Post by danaris »

TylerE wrote: post #137
EdwardDiego wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be fragmented indefinitely, that claim might've carried some weight five years ago, but these days I see very few Python libraries that still support Python 2.7. And, if they do, it strongly implies that they've not been maintained for some time. (See also, a dependency on six) - with the caveat that sometimes you don't need to continually upgrade a library that fills its desired niche perfectly. Hell, if yo…

The people it lost are going to things other than python3.

Even if that's true, it's extremely obvious that Python is the language of choice for some very hot subfields at the moment—things like ML, computer vision, etc.

It may have lost a lot of people who got frustrated by the 2->3 transition, but Python is clearly not in a bad place as a language today.

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