On Fri, Jun 2, 2017 at 1:01 AM, Cory Benfield <c...@lukasa.co.uk> wrote: > The answer to that is honestly not clear to me. I chatted with the pip > developers, and they have 90%+ of their users currently on Python 2, but more > than half of those are on 2.7.9 or later. This shows some interest in > upgrading to newer Python 2s. The question, I think, is: do we end up in a > position where a good number of developers are on 2.7.14 or later and only a > very small fraction on 2.7.13 or earlier before the absolute number of Python > 2 devs drops low enough to just drop Python 2? > > I don’t have an answer to that question. I have a gut instinct that says yes, > probably, but a lack of certainty. My suspicion is that most of the core dev > community believe the answer to that is “no”. >
Let's see. Python 2 users include people on Windows who install it themselves, and then have no mechanism for automatic updates. They'll probably stay on whatever 2.7.x they first got, until something forces them to update. But it also includes people on stable Linux distros, where they have automatic updates provided by Red Hat or Debian or whomever, so a change like this WILL propagate - particularly (a) as the window is three entire years, and (b) if the change is considered important by the distro managers, which is a smaller group of people to convince than the users themselves. By 2020, Windows 7 will be out of support. By various estimates, Win 7 represents roughly half of all current Windows users. That means that, by 2020, at least half of today's Windows users will either have upgraded to a new OS (likely with a wipe-and-fresh-install, so they'll get a newer Python), or be on an unsupported OS, on par with people still running XP today. The same is true for probably close to 100% of Linux users, since any supported Linux distro will be shipping updates between now and 2020, and I don't know much about Mac OS updates, but I rather suspect that they'll also be updating. (Can anyone confirm?) So I'd be in the "yes" category. Across the next few years, I strongly suspect that 2.7.14 will propagate reasonably well. And I also strongly suspect that, even once 2020 hits and Python 2 stops getting updates, it will still be important to a lot of people. These numbers aren't backed by much, but it's slightly better than mere gut instinct. Do you have figures for how many people use pip on Windows vs Linux vs Mac OS? ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
