Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Python 2 removed from Debian

bugs.debian.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 513 posts

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#461

Post by pas »

dagw wrote: post #456
gauddasa wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Python lost a lot more due to the constant flamewars about the transition, how many people wanted to just not care about py3 for many long years, etc.

languages that are actually growing in userbase/popularity are not static. this is hard to accept for many users of popular languages.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#462

Post by pas »

Nullabillity wrote: post #212
dhdhdh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python 3 paved the path for the changes that you mentioned you wished for, some of which are being tackled now. It's not only about what Python 3 offered at the time, but also about what it made possible in the long run.

How does print-as-function help anyone remove the GIL?

simpler code is always important to pave the way for innovation

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#463

Post by pas »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #327
traceroute66 wrote: post #282

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. 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.

it's a volunteer project. nobody stepped up to maintain 2.x as far as I know

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#464

Post by jasonmp85 »

tolmasky wrote: post #353
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

> I write a lot of Python code and don’t really run into Python 2 vs 3 issues anymore. I think you are missing the key point here: I don't write a ton of Python. I don't write any Python. Of course you think this is old news. You write a lot of Python. You're totally plugged in. You've known this is coming, this inside baseball is "the thing" for you. My point is that, believe it or not, the rest of the world does no…

The point is just you don’t understand how your tools work.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#465

Post by ninkendo »

tolmasky wrote: post #363
_eht wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That is precisely what happened: I don't write Python (grandma doesn't write JS). Python changed (JS changed). Environment stopped supporting the old one (browser for grandma, package manager for me). End-user apps didn't keep up (website for grandma, the apps for me). I am now forced to go resolve these issues. This is 100% analogous. Please explain how it is not. In both scenarios you would blame the "app developer…

I fully agree with this sentiment and this is why I’m increasingly convinced that scripting languages (and any language that requires a VM which is not included in the platforms you deploy to) are wholly inappropriate for software which you distribute to non-developer end-users.

Nobody should ever have to be hit with obscure pip/virtualenv/pypy/etc bugs for trying to use your command line app. Nobody should have to suffer through an “installation” step that requires installing the language itself and running a language-provided package manager to install dependencies/etc. I don’t care how much you wrap it in a setup.sh that tries (and typically, fails miserably) to automate everything.

(For OS’s like linux, your distro-provided package managers make the situation slightly better, but only if you ship your app as a package using these distro’s built-in package systems, which is a huge pain if you want to support multiple distros.)

But if you opt to skip the package manager and want to ship a “simple” installation experience using something like a setup.sh, and you want to use a scripting language like python/ruby/etc (integrated with an installation of that language in $HOME or in some system directory), you’re treating your users to a world of pain. Please, please use a compiled language, and ship a binary (or collection of binaries/libraries that can sit in a folder together and just work when you run it.)

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#466

Post by Jenda_ »

mrweasel wrote: post #124
thrdbndndn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, coming from C#, Python 2's unicode support was so bad I almost abandoned it immediately as a Chinese speaker (and to make it worse, I use Windows). You literally can't use IDLE for learning/testing properly half of time due to encoding issues. And what surprised me most is that every time I mentioned this, there would be lots people telling me how this is a superior design because you can operate string like by…

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…

> Personally I feel like they should have yanked Python 2 in Jessie (Debian 8) in 2015, more realistically in Stretch in 2017.

For example GnuRadio started supporting Python 3 with GnuRadio 3.8 released in 2019, and then you had to port all your programs using it to this version. So no, in 2017, the ecosystem was not ready.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#468

Post by [deleted] »

_eht wrote: post #354
tolmasky wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I write a lot of Python code and don’t really run into Python 2 vs 3 issues anymore. I think you are missing the key point here: I don't write a ton of Python. I don't write any Python. Of course you think this is old news. You write a lot of Python. You're totally plugged in. You've known this is coming, this inside baseball is "the thing" for you. My point is that, believe it or not, the rest of the world does no…

This is such an odd and entitled take for a person who is really trying hard not to care about python.

[deleted]

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#469

Post by mikewarot »

The comments here seem to break down into 2 camps, who can't understand each other. It would be nice if someone could actually justify the HN position instead of just trying to cancel any dissent.

I'm in the minority here on HN, I can't stand the fact that something I use daily on Windows[1] and can continue to do so forever (because it's a compiled program, and the binaries will likely work for decades) can't run the same code in Linux, where the source is in python, and both it and wx_windows have made breaking changes.

For me, and my camp, it seems silly to simply write off all the code that conformed to the standards of the time, and doesn't properly bow to the changing fashions of the day.

It would be like declaring all HEX wrenches and tools to be obsolete one day, and insisting that everything was either 7 sided or heptalobe instead, for "reasons"

It seems completely irrational that Python 2 is excluded.

This isn't like a web site where there is an active party supporting the other end, this is code written in a language that had risen to popularity based on how well it was supported.

And that support has been arbitrarily withdrawn, and the HN crowd seems to cheer it on. I submit that this is part of why the year of the Linux Desktop just keeps receding into the future.

[1] https://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#470

Post by waste_monk »

mikewarot wrote: post #469

The comments here seem to break down into 2 camps, who can't understand each other. It would be nice if someone could actually justify the HN position instead of just trying to cancel any dissent. I'm in the minority here on HN, I can't stand the fact that something I use daily on Windows[1] and can continue to do so forever (because it's a compiled program, and the binaries will likely work for decades) can't run th…

>For me, and my camp, it seems silly to simply write off all the code that conformed to the standards of the time, and doesn't properly bow to the changing fashions of the day.

It is not about fashion, it is about resources and manpower. Supporting Python2 is not free, especially post-EOL, and a huge amount of community effort has gone into supporting it. It is not fair to demand that Debian ensure that vendor-unsupported legacy software continue working indefinitely, especially given the environment it would be running on is a moving target that will only diverge further from what was contemporary with Python2 with each release.

>This isn't like a web site where there is an active party supporting the other end

This is exactly like that. The "active party" in this case just happens to be the Debian community.

If you wish to continue using Python2, either stick to running it on an outdated environment such as Debian Buster that supports it natively (and accept the security consequences of doing so), take on the burden of porting it to modern Debian yourself, or seek out one of the commercial support options that exist for post-EOL Python2. You are not entitled to indefinite free labour.

Post reply on HN