Python 2 removed from Debian • Hacker News Board

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#451

Post by tolmasky » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:03 PM UTC

orf wrote: post #450

tolmasky wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are certainly making progress on the argument you believe you are having. My point has always been simple: Python causes more pain than other languages when you're not directly using it. I can get node 0.10 on alpine 3.17 just fine. This demonstrates that your comparisons to server JS are completely wrong. But I know, you're going to tell me this is my problem and I expect the world to do work for me or something…

You can’t get node 0.10 on alpine Linux 3.17 from the official main repository. That 18.x/19.x. So you’re using a community one. And so, you could use a community python2 APK/install process. Except that doesn’t exist. Because nobody wants it. And you’re unwilling to make it yourself, thus you’re complaining that nobody else is maintaining this port for you. The argument I’m making is none of your issues stem from Py…

> You can’t get node 0.10 on alpine Linux 3.17 from the official main repository. That 18.x/19.x. So you’re using a community one. And so, you could use a community python2 APK/install process. Except that doesn’t exist.

What a slight of hand to say "You can get it the same way you can with node, except for you can't". You should go into politics. Anyways, you asked me for a simple example, I gave it, and now you want to say what I want doesn't count because "no one wants it". Just choose a different challenge next time.

> thus you’re complaining that nobody else is maintaining this port for you.

I'm just pointing out a discrepancy with other environments. One you initially denied existed, and once I trivially pointed out did exist, you switched to attacking the complaint itself. Look, if I'm looking at two toasters and one has less features, sure, you can bark at me and tell me to make my own toaster if I want that so bad. OK, sure. Or I'll just get the one that has the features I want. You are still allowed to believe that those features are useless, but you can't deny they exist. It is OK for you to disagree with the properties I value in an ecosystem, you don't have to resort to telling me I don't know what I'm doing just because I value a different set of properties in the ecosystem.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#452

Post by orf » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:09 PM UTC

tolmasky wrote: post #451

orf wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t get node 0.10 on alpine Linux 3.17 from the official main repository. That 18.x/19.x. So you’re using a community one. And so, you could use a community python2 APK/install process. Except that doesn’t exist. Because nobody wants it. And you’re unwilling to make it yourself, thus you’re complaining that nobody else is maintaining this port for you. The argument I’m making is none of your issues stem from Py…

> You can’t get node 0.10 on alpine Linux 3.17 from the official main repository. That 18.x/19.x. So you’re using a community one. And so, you could use a community python2 APK/install process. Except that doesn’t exist. What a slight of hand to say "You can get it the same way you can with node, except for you can't". You should go into politics. Anyways, you asked me for a simple example, I gave it, and now you wan…

You’re looking at two identical toasters from two different manufacturers.

Someone has glued on a big red alarm clock onto the side of one of the toasters.

Your conclusion after seeing this is to write to the manufacturer of the toaster without the alarm clock glued onto it and complain that it’s lacking a big red alarm clock and say they suck because they are not copying the amazing alarm clock features that the other manufacturer has.

Ok.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#453

Post by tolmasky » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:20 PM UTC

orf wrote: post #452

tolmasky wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t get node 0.10 on alpine Linux 3.17 from the official main repository. That 18.x/19.x. So you’re using a community one. And so, you could use a community python2 APK/install process. Except that doesn’t exist. What a slight of hand to say "You can get it the same way you can with node, except for you can't". You should go into politics. Anyways, you asked me for a simple example, I gave it, and now you wan…

You’re looking at two identical toasters from two different manufacturers. Someone has glued on a big red alarm clock onto the side of one of the toasters. Your conclusion after seeing this is to write to the manufacturer of the toaster without the alarm clock glued onto it and complain that it’s lacking a big red alarm clock and say they suck because they are not copying the amazing alarm clock features that the oth…

This is a fiction in your head. I’m not writing any manufacturer. I’m casually commenting on a forum that I’m pretty sure is not Python’s official complaint box. This is as ridiculous as yelling at someone at the bar who says “yeah, I don’t like to use Python that much”. The entire “thrust” of my “threat” to Python is that I’ll try to avoid it in the future. You’re blowing this way out of proportion. If I reacted this way whenever someone said something bad about JavaScript or Objective-C (which I promise you get way more “drive by” complaints), I don’t know what’d I do!

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#454

Post by blooalien » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:21 PM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #431

sheenobu wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone builds a container that is designed like this: FROM debian RUN do-x RUN install python2 and then someone changes do-x, if I understand, the layers below it get invalidated and all of a sudden install python2 fails. This is very bad design but very easy to replicate.

Okay, but surely my poorly written dockerfile that grabs the wrong images and runs broken code is not Debian's or python's problem? Older versions of debian that still support python2 will theoritically be around forever, and any codebase that absolutely needs them should always work. (though I contend that, given that we've had 15 YEARS of warning that this was coming, such instances should be vanishingly rare and n…

> … "given that we've had 15 YEARS of warning that this was coming" …

This right here is the part that I'm still having troubles wrapping my brain around. People still stressing about Python 2 "going away" (it's gone folks; accept it) despite the fact that there's been well beyond a decade of advance warning, and Python 2 having been officially EOL ages ago now.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#455

Post by orf » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:26 PM UTC

tolmasky wrote: post #453

orf wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re looking at two identical toasters from two different manufacturers. Someone has glued on a big red alarm clock onto the side of one of the toasters. Your conclusion after seeing this is to write to the manufacturer of the toaster without the alarm clock glued onto it and complain that it’s lacking a big red alarm clock and say they suck because they are not copying the amazing alarm clock features that the oth…

This is a fiction in your head. I’m not writing any manufacturer. I’m casually commenting on a forum that I’m pretty sure is not Python’s official complaint box. This is as ridiculous as yelling at someone at the bar who says “yeah, I don’t like to use Python that much”. The entire “thrust” of my “threat” to Python is that I’ll try to avoid it in the future. You’re blowing this way out of proportion. If I reacted thi…

Replace “write to the manufacturer” with “leave a review on Amazon”. The point doesn’t change.

Nobody is threatened by anything, and my point has nothing to do with Python.

If someone posts a comment saying “curl sucks! Every time I run it it just prints ‘command not found’” I’d of course try to tell them that’s not a fault with curl.

If they replied with “yes it is because I can’t figure out how to install it from this 3rd party site” then the discussion may become protected.

But ok, maybe we will agree to disagree.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#456

Post by dagw » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:33 PM UTC

gauddasa wrote: post #433

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…

It's ok. At least our children won't have to go through this dreaded dependency hell. Also, the role of Python 3 in popularizing Python was worth all the pain. Without version 3 it would not have been where it stands today.

Without version 3 it would not have been where it stands today.

I fail to see how that is true. Python was already catching on in a big way back during python 2.7 and I'd guess it probably lost at least 18 month worth of momentum building with python 2->3.

I'd say Pythons popularity today is at best unrelated to python 3.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#457

Post by tolmasky » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

orf wrote: post #455

tolmasky wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fiction in your head. I’m not writing any manufacturer. I’m casually commenting on a forum that I’m pretty sure is not Python’s official complaint box. This is as ridiculous as yelling at someone at the bar who says “yeah, I don’t like to use Python that much”. The entire “thrust” of my “threat” to Python is that I’ll try to avoid it in the future. You’re blowing this way out of proportion. If I reacted thi…

Replace “write to the manufacturer” with “leave a review on Amazon”. The point doesn’t change. Nobody is threatened by anything, and my point has nothing to do with Python. If someone posts a comment saying “curl sucks! Every time I run it it just prints ‘command not found’” I’d of course try to tell them that’s not a fault with curl. If they replied with “yes it is because I can’t figure out how to install it from t…

No, you’d refuse to read the curl complaint because it’s too long, and instead arbitrarily decide that the entire discussion should hinge on issuing a challenge for them to find you one place where curl doesn’t work. And then when he does, you’d say “So what! No one wants curl there anyways!”

Afterwards you’d get involved in a long weird analogy discussion about two people arguing about git. But that fault would be shared by both of them.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#458

Post by wlonkly » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 11:16 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #376

pjc50 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd do "#!/usr/bin/env python" for old code and "#!/usr/bin/env python3" for new code .. but you can't use old libraries in new code.

Just to clarify, in Perl you can have your main code be in Perl 6 (or whatever), and then "import" and use libraries that "use v5.26"?

No, Perl 6 is a completely different language (now called Raku, because otherwise it sounds like a newer version of Perl 5, and never intended to be compatible with Perl 5). But because of the Perl 6 situation, even a change the size of the Python 2 to 3 change would be a "Perl 5" version update.

I think having Python 2 vs. 3 is a clearer demarcation, myself, but the Perl community cares a LOT about backwards compatibility.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#459

Post by _8j50 » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 11:35 PM UTC

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…

As a matter of practicality I agree but for one not everyone knows this and for another distros like debian don't support what you are saying. We are resorting to pyenv because distros refuse to maintain different application specific python environments. You can pin python versions and deps per package if needed.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#460

Post by peterfirefly » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 11:50 PM UTC

broeng wrote: post #145

EdwardDiego wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An excellent question, how do you smoothly break compatibility?

I think two aspects have played a significant part in the migration pain: 1. The amount of breaking changes. If it was possible to do a little at a time, over a series of releases, it's a bit more manageable. 2. Being an interpreted language makes it difficult/painful to break compatibility over a series of releases, as all applications and libraries have to be kept source compatible. Source compatibility also makes…

They also changed the C interface at the same time -- and many Python libraries had non-trivial amounts of C code in them because Python was and is so slow.

It was also for a time impossible (or close to impossible) to run the same Python code in 2.x and 3.x. It helped when later 2.x versions acquired more 'from __future__ import'.

They really aimed for making it maximally hard to support v2 and v3 at the same time which created a nasty coordination problem: why upgrade if the libraries aren't ready and why upgrade the libraries if there are no users.