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Python 2 removed from Debian

bugs.debian.org

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Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#331

Post by wildrhythms »

leephillips wrote: post #302
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.

The number of times I find a script that blindly assumes 'python' points to its required version is too damn high. It makes me question the general competency of the people shipping Python code.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#332

Post by dagmx »

tolmasky wrote: post #315
happymellon wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Your issue with Python is that some people having bad development practices?

That was one issue I mentioned. You know that. You read my comments. However, I will take your snarky reply and turn it into lemonade by using it as an opportunity to talk about how often development teams fail to consider the social implications of their changes. As is mentioned in another comment on this post, the Python team seems to readily admit in retrospect that they didn't predict the pain of having no clear…

I think part of the issue is that your comments are very ambiguous as to what issues you actually hit.

Most of the major Python packages did maintain 2 and 3 compatibility at the same time. Maybe a few packages had bad coding practices but you’re going to hit that in any language.

I think you’re extrapolating unfairly

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#333

Post by dagmx »

numpad0 wrote: post #322
Waterluvian wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The official recommendation from the python developers has always been to keep the unversioned python as a symlink to python2

It was to precisely avoid this scenario where you get it switched out from under you.

This doesn’t mean every distro followed suite (though most popular ones were good about it) , but the biggest issue is users. Tons of users create the symlink or alias for convenience and then forget about it till stuff breaks.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#334

Post by leephillips »

wildrhythms wrote: post #331
leephillips wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The number of times I find a script that blindly assumes 'python' points to its required version is too damn high. It makes me question the general competency of the people shipping Python code.

It’s inexcusable in recent scripts, but some of these date from the time when there was only python2. No, the root of the problem, as pointed out by many others here, is the policy decision to create two incompatible interpreters both called “python”.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#336

Post by comfypotato »

dagmx wrote: post #332
tolmasky wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was one issue I mentioned. You know that. You read my comments. However, I will take your snarky reply and turn it into lemonade by using it as an opportunity to talk about how often development teams fail to consider the social implications of their changes. As is mentioned in another comment on this post, the Python team seems to readily admit in retrospect that they didn't predict the pain of having no clear…

I think part of the issue is that your comments are very ambiguous as to what issues you actually hit. Most of the major Python packages did maintain 2 and 3 compatibility at the same time. Maybe a few packages had bad coding practices but you’re going to hit that in any language. I think you’re extrapolating unfairly

Seconded. Noted comment is only mildly snarky at worst. Thanks for your insight on the python3 migrations though. I’ll be wary if I ever see something in that context on the horizon.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#337

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

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…

This rant feels like it would have been relevant in 2016-2018 or so, but in 2022-2023 I write a lot of Python code and don’t really run into Python 2 vs 3 issues anymore. Once Python 2 officially EOL’ed the ecosystem basically managed to port whatever was important enough to keep using over to Python 3. Im sure some legacy megacorps are still doing stuff in Python 2 but that’s no different from these corps running some ancient version of Java which is also somewhat common.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#338

Post by sharpneli »

danaris wrote: post #326
ilyt wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That means the piece of software will work also in the future.

Personally I only use python for throwaway scripts. Whatever is written in Python likely won’t work in 10 years anymore. So they’re all lost in time. Whereas I can continue some of my C++ eternity projects and they still work perfectly fine.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#339

Post by wokwokwok »

newjersey wrote: post #250
wokwokwok wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, the breaking change to python3 was a disaster. There’s no need to sugar coat it. It was incompetently managed, in a way that made the technical success of the work look like a failure. That’s on them. They screwed up. I lived through it; I feel no particular need to smile and nod and say “it wasn’t that bad”. It was bad. Things are good now! Python 3 is great, it’s well supported and the people involved all lea…

> No one is seriously going back to Python 2 at this point. No, the community is stupid and wrong. My machine learning professor (actual professor, not a teaching assistant) only used Python 2 in 2017. Imagine how many people had their opinions shaped by someone like them. > … it is: never do this. By that standard, we would never get things like angular 2 or Raku. Would it be better if we renamed Python 3 to some ot…

> No, the community is wrong.

Sometimes.

I mean, Russ basically said that about all the work people were doing on the golang package manager and did his own thing, and it worked out. Good job! Sometimes, a smart person can do something that is better when they're deeply steeped in the domain.

> No, the community is stupid.

I personally find that most communities have a lot of very clever, very thoughtful people in them, and if you listen, you can learn a lot from them.

Just because they don't agree with you, doesn't make them stupid.

I think that its basic respect to listen to your community, acknowledge them and think about what they say, even if you go your own way.

...but, if you (as a maintainer) just think they (your community of users) are just a bunch of idiots, do whatever you like. They are idiots if they hang around in a community like that.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#340

Post by toast0 »

acqq wrote: post #257
linsomniac wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that effectively what was done with Python? You'd do "#!/usr/bin/env python" for old code and "#!/usr/bin/env python3" for new code. Rather than it being wrapped up in a single entry-point, you had the different runtimes and library sets.

No, it's completely different. The newer Perl versions correctly continued to execute the old but already working scripts. The Python mess was, IMO, a typical example of bureaucracy inventing for itself new but previously unnecessary work to justify its existence, so I agree that that the decisions of how to introduce Py3 features caused (and still cause) waste of immense amount of the hours world-wide that could hav…

> No, it's completely different. The newer Perl versions correctly continued to execute the old but already working scripts.

There was some breakage between 5.6, 5.8, and 5.10; Unicode is hard, and it takes time to get it right. But I think the key difference I've heard as a mostly python avoider is the intent was for code written for 5.6 to probably work in 5.8 and 5.10 and if it doesn't, for there to be a way to have one file that works for all versions.

From what I understand, it's not easy to have a python module/script that works in 2 and 3, and you can't go to 3 unless your dependencies do, so if you have a lot of dependencies (as is modern), you're stuck on 2. Your dependencies won't want to move to 3 either, because their users are stuck on 2, so if they just switch to 3, they're droping users; instead they need to support two parallel versions of their code. Most perl modules didn't have to do anything special to support 5.6 and 5.8, but if they did, it was usually small and it could be done within the file with conditional compilation --- I don't think that was an option for python.

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