Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On 07.04.2013 21:50, Martin v. Löwis wrote: So I believe that extension building is becoming more and more painful on Windows for Python 2.7 as time passes (and it is already way more painful than it is on Linux), and I see no way to do much about that. The stable ABI would have been a solution, but it's too late now for 2.7. I think extension building for Python 2.7 on Windows for this reason is moving from VS2008 to GCC 4.7 (MinGW). When using VS, we are stuck with an old compiler (i.e. the .NET 3.5 SDK). With GCC, there is no such issue - we just link with whatever CRT is appropriate. Thus, providing link libraries for GCC/MinGW (both for the Python and the CRT DLL) somewhat alleviates the problem, unless using VS is mandatory. A long-term solution might be to expose the CRT used by the Python 2.7 DLL with DLL forwarding. That way, linking with the Python DLL's import library would also link the correct CRT. Sturla ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
;) there's the missing bit. btw apologies if that looked offensive: it wasn't intended. I disagree on bilingual extension modules are easier. While #ifdef can sort some issues (compiling ones mostly) it won't be much of a help if a module crash (and not much help from testing either). In that case debugging it involves a lot of steps as gatering the core dumps (if available), having a readily build python debug version, a debugger and restoring the crashing system in a similar state. All these steps might not be possible at all (imagine a secured production server). I'm not saying it is not possible but the caused downtime can quickly escalate (think of it in days terms more than hours). These are hidden costs to a company and it is hard to convince anyone to agressively port something to 3.x if it is reliably working on let's say 2.x: especially under time pressure conditions. On the bright side there's some success moving into 2.7: and we can all make sure the move to 3.x will be as small as possible in case in future time/policy constraints are relaxed. Thanks, Antonio On 2013-04-09 00:48, Barry Warsaw wrote: On Apr 08, 2013, at 11:32 PM, Antonio Cavallo wrote: Cool, next time I have to port an extension written in C/C++ I'll be looking only for bytes vs. strings problems. I knew it was easy. Since I didn't see a smiley, I'll assume that wasn't sarcastic. ;) In some ways bilingual extension modules are easier because of #ifdef, but the general principle still holds. If you have a clear bytes v. strings story, it's not really that difficult to port extension modules either, at least IME. -Barry ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On 4/7/2013 2:02 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote: There's not much of a point in fixing bugs that always existed in 2.7, I has been suggested that backporting bugfix patches from current 3.x to 2.7 will make it easier to port from the atest 2.7.x to 3.x. I have no idea how true that is. since must 2.7 users are by now used to working around these. An exception is Idle, where the workaround is to grit one teeth and perhaps yell 'Idle is broken' or to switch to something else. With PEP343 accepted, this is rapidly being worked on. NEWS for 2.7.5 already has 8 Idle items. Most of the credit goes to Roger Serwy. tjr ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
In article cap7+vjlzb5xl8cxbmibunnig9y4+49f17vmfb9lznf0asnx...@mail.gmail.com, Guido van Rossum gu...@python.org wrote: [...] But perhaps we could change the focus for 2.7 development a bit: instead of fixing bugs (or bickering about whether something is a bug fix or a new feature) we could limit changes to ensuring that it works on newer platforms. Martin mentioned that building 2.7 for Windows with the same toolchain that was used for the 2.7.0 release is getting more and more problematic. I'm not sure, but I could imagine similar problems for future versions of OS X and even Linux (though the Linux distributions typically take care of issues themselves). That's an excellent point. In the OS X world, my sense is that OS and build tool updates are adopted more quickly by users than in less homogenous platform environments so we've tried to be be pragmatic about supporting new releases of Xcode built tools in Python maintenance branches like 2.7. For example, in 2.7.4 there were some significant changes to building Python and to Distutils to support extension module building with the latest Xcode releases. (That's not to say we are always as timely as we should be.) I don't think there has been any major disagreements that doing those kinds of limited changes for platform support are in scope. There have also been some changes to better support cross-building for platforms that have become more strategically important, like ARM. These have been more controversial but a good case can be made for considering such changes as pragmatic long-term investments. It might be a good idea to have a more formal policy in place going forward for 2.7.x. Beyond build tools is the issue of the components that Python depends on at runtime, primarily third-party libraries. Many of these are also under active development, with schedules and compatibility criteria that differ from those we use. In some cases, security issues will force the rapid adoption of new versions, in other cases, widespread adoption on the platforms we support will force this. Again, pragmatically, we'll need to continue to track these components and support newer versions as necessary in order for maintained versions of Python to remain viable. (And we need to step up the activity in some areas. Tcl/Tk 8.6 is now official and starting to be adopted. Tkinter and IDLE are intimately dependent on Tk and, AFAIK, we don't really have anyone closely following the changes there and their implications for Python. Thankfully, Serhiy has been doing some work with 8.6 already.) -- Ned Deily, n...@acm.org ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Benjamin Peterson benja...@python.orgwrote: Per my last message, 2.7.4 has at long last been released. I apologize for the long interval between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4. To create more determinism in the future, I will be soon updating PEP 373 with approximate dates of future 2.7 bugfix releases. I will be aiming for 6 month intervals. This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. At any rate, 2.7.0 was released in July 2010, which currently puts us within a few months of 3 years of maintenance. Over the past year, I've been happy to see a lot of movement towards 3 including the porting of important codebases like Twisted and Django. However, there's also no doubt that 2.x is still widely used. Obviously, there will be people who would be happy if we kept maintaining 2.7 until 2025, but I think at this juncture 5 total years of maintenance is reasonable. This means there will be approximately 4 more 2.7 releases. Thoughts? Since this has ended up with roughly 50 responses, I'm going to try and summarize where things stand for my own benefit. First off, core devs almost all seem fine with declaring an end date to maintaining 2.7 and seeing these last releases happen every 6 months (since Benjamin volunteered and I think Martin and Ned said they are fine with that as well and it's really their call). The question for EOL seems to be whether to do one more release after 3.4 goes out in early 2014 or to see 2.7 through until early 2015. The other question seems to be whether we should lock down the branch so people don't think we will continue to accept patches and such (much like Georg has done with the 3.2 pre-commit hook). So those two points -- where to draw the line and whether to mothball the branch -- seem to be the only open questions. For me, I think a possible compromise might work out. What if we say python-dev will see patches backported until the release following 3.4, but after that the last two releases (which sees us into 2015 as Benjamin originally proposed) will only be patched by contributions from the community? IOW we make it very clear that python-dev considers themselves off the hook after 3.4 in terms of feeling obliged to backport any of their own code, but we are willing to examine and commit patches as provided by external contributors as long as they apply to all applicable branches. E.g. if someone wants something fixed in 2.7 after 3.4 is out they need to supply the patches for both 2.7 and 3.4 so that python-dev is doing nothing more than acting and gatekeepers on the repo and doing the commits on behalf of the patch writer. And then once the final 2.7 release is out we lock it down to make it abundantly clear that python-dev is entirely done with Python 2. ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Christian Tismer tis...@stackless.comwrote: On 07.04.13 14:10, Skip Montanaro wrote: Where I work (a trading firm that uses Python as just one of many different pieces of technology, not a company where Python is the core technology upon which the firm is based) we are only just now migrating from 2.4 to 2.7. I can't imagine we'll have migrated to Python 3 in two years. It's not like we haven't seen this coming, but you can only justify moving so fast with technology that already works, especially if, like Python, you use it with lots of other packages (most/all of which themselves have to be ported to Python 3) and in-house software. I think the discussion should focus on who's left on 2.x and why, not, yeah, releases every six months for the next couple years ought to do it. when I read this, I was slightly shocked. You know what? We are pleased to announce the release of *Python 2.4, final* on November 30, 2004. I know that companies try to save (time? money?) something by not upgrading software, and this is extremely annoying. I'm in the same boat as Skip (just now moving from 2.4 to 2.7), and Python *is* a core technology for us. It has nothing really to do with saving time or money, its about priorities. The transition from 2.3 to 2.4 was actually fairly painful (don't ask me why, I don't even remember anymore), but we got stuck on 2.4 not by any specific decision -- it simply worked, and our time was always focused upon solving problems and improving our software itself. Could we have solved our problems easier if we upgraded Python and had new tools? Some, yes. (Some features we have added had me actually walking through third party code bases and backporting it -- converting with to try/finally is an amusing big one for example) For one thing, even with this relatively ancient Python, we almost never ran into bugs. It just worked and worked fine, so when we looked at our development plan the list of feature requests and issues for various customers (especially those that were potential new clients) overrode infrastructure upgrades as priorities. However, in a huge system that has many tens of thousands of lines of code, doing a platform upgrade is just a serious endeavor -- and its often not even Python's fault itself, but the reality that it means we're going to be upgrading *everything* and involves a much more involved QA cycle and often runs into third party software. We are finally upgrading now because the time to work around certain bugs in both Python and third-party libraries that no longer support 2.4 are enough for us to say, okay, we finally really do need to get this done. Migration to Python 3 ... IF it ever happens is more of a question then when. That's not a indictment of Python 3 or a problem with the current plan (for what its worth, the bugfix every 6 months until 5 years is up seems totally reasonable). Any new product we do, I'd seriously consider starting from Python 3. (Though PyPy supporting Py3 would help that argument a lot) The case for migrating existing products is a lot harder to make. But I think every employee (including you) can quite easily put some pressure on his company by claiming that Python 2.x is a dead end, and everybody is about to move on to 3.x. This does not have to be true, I just recognize that by claiming it and doing it with your projects, the movement becomes a reality. Just say that we all need to move on and cannot care about companies that ignore this necessity. The thing is, 2.7 works. Some third-party libraries we rely upon have no clear sign for when they will be ported (such as wxPython), and though we are transitioning away from certain others (omniORB for Apache Thrift for example), that process itself is planned to be a gradual thing for the next year, at least. My concern is for the health of my company, and happiness of my customers; I love Python and am an advocate for it, but in my day job, pushing things forward is just about at the bottom of my list of concerns. (Though, our migration to 2.7 is actually part of a long term strategic plan to embrace pypy) And now I go back to lurking. --Stephen ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On 08/04/2013 16:42, Stephen Hansen wrote: The thing is, 2.7 works. Some third-party libraries we rely upon have no clear sign for when they will be ported (such as wxPython), and though we are transitioning away from certain others (omniORB for Apache Thrift for example), that process itself is planned to be a gradual thing for the next year, at least. From http://wiki.wxpython.org/ProjectPhoenix WooHoo! Phoenix runs on Python 3!! --Stephen -- If you're using GoogleCrap™ please read this http://wiki.python.org/moin/GoogleGroupsPython. Mark Lawrence ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
2013/4/8 Stephen Hansen me+pyt...@ixokai.io: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Christian Tismer tis...@stackless.com wrote: On 07.04.13 14:10, Skip Montanaro wrote: Where I work (a trading firm that uses Python as just one of many different pieces of technology, not a company where Python is the core technology upon which the firm is based) we are only just now migrating from 2.4 to 2.7. I can't imagine we'll have migrated to Python 3 in two years. It's not like we haven't seen this coming, but you can only justify moving so fast with technology that already works, especially if, like Python, you use it with lots of other packages (most/all of which themselves have to be ported to Python 3) and in-house software. I think the discussion should focus on who's left on 2.x and why, not, yeah, releases every six months for the next couple years ought to do it. when I read this, I was slightly shocked. You know what? We are pleased to announce the release of Python 2.4, final on November 30, 2004. I know that companies try to save (time? money?) something by not upgrading software, and this is extremely annoying. I'm in the same boat as Skip (just now moving from 2.4 to 2.7), and Python *is* a core technology for us. It has nothing really to do with saving time or money, its about priorities. The transition from 2.3 to 2.4 was actually fairly painful (don't ask me why, I don't even remember anymore), but we got stuck on 2.4 not by any specific decision -- it simply worked, and our time was always focused upon solving problems and improving our software itself. Could we have solved our problems easier if we upgraded Python and had new tools? Some, yes. (Some features we have added had me actually walking through third party code bases and backporting it -- converting with to try/finally is an amusing big one for example) For one thing, even with this relatively ancient Python, we almost never ran into bugs. It just worked and worked fine, so when we looked at our development plan the list of feature requests and issues for various customers (especially those that were potential new clients) overrode infrastructure upgrades as priorities. However, in a huge system that has many tens of thousands of lines of code, doing a platform upgrade is just a serious endeavor -- and its often not even Python's fault itself, but the reality that it means we're going to be upgrading *everything* and involves a much more involved QA cycle and often runs into third party software. We are finally upgrading now because the time to work around certain bugs in both Python and third-party libraries that no longer support 2.4 are enough for us to say, okay, we finally really do need to get this done. Migration to Python 3 ... IF it ever happens is more of a question then when. That's not a indictment of Python 3 or a problem with the current plan (for what its worth, the bugfix every 6 months until 5 years is up seems totally reasonable). Any new product we do, I'd seriously consider starting from Python 3. (Though PyPy supporting Py3 would help that argument a lot) The case for migrating existing products is a lot harder to make. You might also think about rewriting the code so that it kind of works on both 2.7 *and* 3.3. By that I mean that your code on Python 3 should not necessarily work but neither it should raise SyntaxError. If from the start you use: - six - except exception as: - __future__ module’s from __future__ import division, print_statement, unicode_literals - fix warnings signaled by python -3 app.py ...and other similar tricks, your ported code is likely to look nicer and more modern and a future porting to Python 3 should be a lot less painful. At least, if the circumstances are right, I personally might see some value in doing so. --- Giampaolo https://code.google.com/p/pyftpdlib/ https://code.google.com/p/psutil/ https://code.google.com/p/pysendfile/ ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Am 07.04.2013 20:02, schrieb Guido van Rossum: But perhaps we could change the focus for 2.7 development a bit: instead of fixing bugs (or bickering about whether something is a bug fix or a new feature) we could limit changes to ensuring that it works on newer platforms. Martin mentioned that building 2.7 for Windows with the same toolchain that was used for the 2.7.0 release is getting more and more problematic. I'm not sure, but I could imagine similar problems for future versions of OS X and even Linux (though the Linux distributions typically take care of issues themselves). I would like this new focus :-) Note that for 2.7.4 we did backport the bsddb module to build with recent db-5.x versions, the embedded libffi library to build on new platforms. I would like to see a backport for #17536 too, a change to support new web browsers in an updated runtime environment. I would like to continue to backport cross build changes to 2.7.x, before all these people with Raspberry Pi's get too much annoyed about slow native builds. Support for new targets should be allowed after a review. There's not much of a point in fixing bugs that always existed in 2.7, since must 2.7 users are by now used to working around these. However, I do see a point in supporting builds targeting newer OS versions. The upcoming Ubuntu 13.04 release uses mostly Python 3.3.1 for the desktop images, but still ships with Python 2.7.4 too on the images. For now most third party modules and extensions still have to be available for both versions. For now these binary packages (in the sense of a package in a Linux distribution) are built for Python 2 and 3 from the same source package, so keeping the build procedures and support about the same way helps with this approach. Of course I can patch things locally, but would prefer to push these changes upstream. At the language summit I was surprised to hear about a common subset of backports for other vendor branches. Matthias ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
If from the start you use: - six ... There's the rub. We are not blessed with Guido's time machine where I work. Much of the Python code we run was written long before six was a gleam in anybody's eye. Heck, some of it was probably written before some active members of python-dev graduated from high school. :-) I'm really amazed at how many people seem to have the impression that porting to Python 3 should be no big deal. Please go back and read Guido's post in this thread from yesterday. He identified many barriers to moving between versions. This is not really a Python-specific problem. All large organizations encounter this, and wind up supporting lots of legacy code, long after its original authors are gone. Go to monster.com and search for COBOL or Ada. As I wrote in my previous message, we are only now moving from 2.4 to 2.7. If moving to Python 3 wasn't going to be much more difficult, I think we would have attempted that. 2.7 Seemed like the better step though, especially considering its compatibility with 2.4 and the fact that it has a lot of things backported from Python 3 to ease the eventual transition to Python 3. Skip ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 04/08/2013 04:40 PM, Skip Montanaro wrote: I'm really amazed at how many people seem to have the impression that porting to Python 3 should be no big deal. FWIW, the effort of porting the modern bits of the Zope ecosystem (the ones I still use in Pyramid apps today, meaning the component architecture, the ZODB, and a few others) soaked up basically all of my FLOSS time between the two Santa Clara PyCons. To be fair, some of that effort went into improving test coverage, docs, etc., to ensure that the apps running against the ported librarties wouldn't break, even on Python2: but is was *not* a trivial effort. Tres. - -- === Tres Seaver +1 540-429-0999 tsea...@palladion.com Palladion Software Excellence by Designhttp://palladion.com -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlFjMdYACgkQ+gerLs4ltQ62mACfSxdVNlTpSusR5MGMmuIw7lhf 3yIAoIJd6P8KoewUAjJnViuziWQWPHb8 =Bpul -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On Apr 08, 2013, at 05:08 PM, Tres Seaver wrote: FWIW, the effort of porting the modern bits of the Zope ecosystem (the ones I still use in Pyramid apps today, meaning the component architecture, the ZODB, and a few others) soaked up basically all of my FLOSS time between the two Santa Clara PyCons. To be fair, some of that effort went into improving test coverage, docs, etc., to ensure that the apps running against the ported librarties wouldn't break, even on Python2: but is was *not* a trivial effort. I've ported a ton of stuff, most of it not written by me. The actual job of porting (not counting convincing your manager to let you do it) will either be easy and quick or painful and difficult wink. It's often hard to know before you start. It almost always comes down to bytes vs. strings, IME. Sometimes, the code you're porting has a clear model and you just have to understand it, and then the porting goes fairly smoothly. Often, the model isn't clear or there *is* no distinction, in which case your life will suck. It's important to realize that everyone doing porting work now is also making Python 3 better by helping to find the pain points in the language and stdlib. The u-prefix is a perfect example of this. .format() on bytes (issue3982) and some of the discussions around issue17445 are two examples where we're at least identifying additional pain, if not yet fixing it. Python 3.3 is easier to port to than 3.2 is. I hope that we'll be able to take all of our experiences and funnel that into 3.4 to make it a better porting target still. Then, even though people will still be using Python 2 when Orlijn is BDFL, we'll at least be making progress. We also want to make 3.4 and future Python 3 releases so compelling that starting new projects in Python 3 will be a no-brainer, and we want to make sure that the batteries, both in the stdlib and 3rd party are up to the task. Eventually Python 2 programmers will be like today's COBOL programmers (which is good for future employment prospects :), but there's more Python 3 code out there waiting to be written than there is existing Python 2 code today. :) Don't worry about what you *can't* port! - -Barry -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJRYz8jAAoJEBJutWOnSwa/lsQP/jyIYBzfl9eDXw81Ar4t+Uls 7JOYfQqQXhMXL2f1XLHivCplhso0YBZn2ZepXJ9kLJ4SnO7bPZbo+esD99IoAlhG QXjlvUnrSsc9mQG16HeuQLHjRmiZPg/mT+ACPuv3/ixxZggaKga7Jdcr2Xpo4KIS 89WzG2MWYhVGr3o28AAgSkSN/4fbmXRzjwmox0QjyhPdM6CWbTLO5KkF1cOLIXi/ UyYmlZAwSqVxR6cVRsGVwLStUy417UwZnc0h71IJxgRwgXOZDXzVKPvy/JqbVsK7 451aWB/mTkiaKkp+Qi0ebjZLLmSyEITS8DOurZKIy4Qfppyqy+patwazsY113zAg wdexiFfFc2W4zLFflxTScqULFJulYyL7KzSsQBHPcou1G5nDUVXBXoM+AC71EBtd TE+tyAhZWE38/mfDtOBCJCkJzevzJWF4tpGVgm1Gd5hSU7M8Yb2NQcZLYY0UxzZK weDItJUYTSYEQh6j9nBlZGaX9v62SnXPlZaV2s9/bbVFsHekwYQcEAFlpGUqeUxi KFFzS1GUl8IE8ZcHJDVW6U3YXzBSUKdSBa55IHw5hD+I730WAj8wq8aH7yFhyyzv jyFRdhtEFhapnA2zpxogFGVLPRjl9iOphfVnUR6wNuh7q+226GsqHyaMbkWBM9Cb sg39ITeWH6C0jMMxiGfx =ZAcF -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
It almost always comes down to bytes vs. strings, IME. Cool, next time I have to port an extension written in C/C++ I'll be looking only for bytes vs. strings problems. I knew it was easy. Thanks ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:11 AM, mar...@v.loewis.de wrote: Quoting Benjamin Peterson benja...@python.org: This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. I'd like to promote the idea to abandon 2.7 bug fix releases earlier than that, e.g. along with the release of 3.4. My recollection is that we didn't actually promise any specific time frame; I recall that Guido said that Python 2.7 would be supported indefinitely, which is not infinitely [1]. The Whats New says [2] It’s very likely the 2.7 release will have a longer period of maintenance compared to earlier 2.x versions. which explicitly refuses to set a date. Of course, individual committers may have promised a more specific policy publicly in the past. Since Christian asked: I'll likely continue to make binary releases for Windows as along as Benjamin declares releases to be bug fix releases. However, it will become increasingly difficult for users to actually use these releases to build extension modules since Microsoft decided to take VS 2008 Express offline (VS 2008 remains available to MSDN subscribers; getting it from a store might also be difficult in 2014). I wonder whether the burden of maintaining three branches for bug fixes (2.7, 3.3, default) and three more for security fixes (2.6, 3.1, 3.2) is really sustainable for committers. I wouldn't want to back off wrt. security fixes, and 2.6 will soon fall out of the promised 5 years (after the initial release). However, stopping to accept bug fixes for 2.7 would IMO significantly reduce the load for committers - it would certainly continue to get security fixes, and (for the time being) indefinitely so. Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. I'm doubtful with respect to a community-managed ongoing 2.7 bug fix release (i.e. I doubt that it will happen); the same was discussed for a next 2.x feature release, and it hasn't happened. OTOH, it is very likely that people will publish their own patches to 2.7 throughout the net, just as the Linux distributions already do. It may even happen that some volunteer offers to publish a combined repository for such patches, with various members of the community having write access to such a repository (but no formal releases coming out of that). Martin, you guys are shooting yourself in a foot. Almost noone uses python 3 in production, even at pycon, which is the more progressive crowd. There is a giant group of people using python that are not as vocal. While I bet some are using Python 3, Python 2 is incredibly popular for the long tail of libraries and applications. How much is 2.7 a burden? There are no major changes and it's pretty cool to consider it done. For what is worth, we'll maintain the stdlib part of 2.7 past 2 years. It would be cool if python-dev participated in that. Cheers, fijal ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:11 AM, mar...@v.loewis.de wrote: Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. Well... People are in general *stuck* on Python 2. They are not staying because they want to. So I'm not so sure migration rate will increase because an end is announced or reached. //Lennart ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Martin, you guys are shooting yourself in a foot. Almost noone uses python 3 in production, even at pycon, which is the more progressive crowd. There is a giant group of people using python that are not as vocal. While I bet some are using Python 3, Python 2 is incredibly popular for the long tail of libraries and applications. How much is 2.7 a burden? There are no major changes and it's pretty cool to consider it done. Indeed - hence I think it is just fine to stop applying bug fixes to it, as well. People for whom it works fine today apparently don't run into any significant bugs. They can happily continue to use it as-is for ten or more years. It will not go away just when we reduce changes to security fixes. It will remain available for download, the documentation will keep being online, people can continue to ask questions about it on python-list, and continue to get answers. Stopping to apply bug fixes does not really *end* Python 2.7. It's only that people who *do* run into bugs don't have the option anymore that we will eventually publish a fixed release. Their options reduce to - port to 3.x (particularly interesting if Python 3.x *already* fixed it) - find a work-around - maintain a bug fix locally - do something else entirely (like abandoning Python) People deserve to know our plans, so we really need to agree on them and then announce them (see PEP 404). However, people (IMO) have no right to expect us to maintain Python 2.7 until they migrate to 3.x. If we would do that, they will never migrate. Regards, Martin ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:44 AM, mar...@v.loewis.de wrote: Martin, you guys are shooting yourself in a foot. Almost noone uses python 3 in production, even at pycon, which is the more progressive crowd. There is a giant group of people using python that are not as vocal. While I bet some are using Python 3, Python 2 is incredibly popular for the long tail of libraries and applications. How much is 2.7 a burden? There are no major changes and it's pretty cool to consider it done. Indeed - hence I think it is just fine to stop applying bug fixes to it, as well. People for whom it works fine today apparently don't run into any significant bugs. They can happily continue to use it as-is for ten or more years. It will not go away just when we reduce changes to security fixes. It will remain available for download, the documentation will keep being online, people can continue to ask questions about it on python-list, and continue to get answers. No, they manage to work around issues. It doesn't mean there are no bugs or bugfixes won't help. But I'm not going to argue with you, I don't think you can be convinced about anything here. Stopping to apply bug fixes does not really *end* Python 2.7. It's only that people who *do* run into bugs don't have the option anymore that we will eventually publish a fixed release. Their options reduce to - port to 3.x (particularly interesting if Python 3.x *already* fixed it) - find a work-around - maintain a bug fix locally - do something else entirely (like abandoning Python) People deserve to know our plans, so we really need to agree on them and then announce them (see PEP 404). However, people (IMO) have no right to expect us to maintain Python 2.7 until they migrate to 3.x. If we would do that, they will never migrate. Regards, Martin As far as I remember python 3 was supposed to be a better language, not just the maintained version. It's such a bad idea to force people to go through porting because 2.x is not maintained any more. If they never migrate on the premises of python 3 being a better language what does it say about python 3? I cannot of course tell you what you should do in your free time though, if you don't feel like doing anything in that area, fine. We'll maintain the stdlib of Python 2.7 past the 2 year mark though. Cheers, fijal ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Quoting Lennart Regebro rege...@gmail.com: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:11 AM, mar...@v.loewis.de wrote: Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. Well... People are in general *stuck* on Python 2. They are not staying because they want to. So I'm not so sure migration rate will increase because an end is announced or reached. I assume you say that because people rely on libraries that haven't been ported (correct me if there are other reasons to be stuck). With an announced end-of-life, I'm certain that migration rate will increase, because people will now urge their suppliers, pointing to the announcement. With Benjamin's proposed schedule, they would still have two years for their suppliers to act. Even under my proposed schedule, there would be plenty of time. Also, this is all free software (at least most of it). Nobody can *really* be stuck on a not-ported dependency, as they could always port it themselves, and even fork if the developer refuses to integrate the port (and you know that this actually happens). Regards, Martin ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Maciej Fijalkowski, 07.04.2013 09:52: As far as I remember python 3 was supposed to be a better language, not just the maintained version. It's such a bad idea to force people to go through porting because 2.x is not maintained any more. If they never migrate on the premises of python 3 being a better language what does it say about python 3? Nothing. Most people simply don't do the switch all by themselves before you can convince that that what they have in their hands is actually a dead parrot. Stefan ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On 07/04/13 17:44, mar...@v.loewis.de wrote: Martin, you guys are shooting yourself in a foot. Almost noone uses python 3 in production, even at pycon, which is the more progressive crowd. There is a giant group of people using python that are not as vocal. While I bet some are using Python 3, Python 2 is incredibly popular for the long tail of libraries and applications. How much is 2.7 a burden? There are no major changes and it's pretty cool to consider it done. Indeed - hence I think it is just fine to stop applying bug fixes to it, as well. People for whom it works fine today apparently don't run into any significant bugs. They can happily continue to use it as-is for ten or more years. It will not go away just when we reduce changes to security fixes. It will remain available for download, the documentation will keep being online, people can continue to ask questions about it on python-list, and continue to get answers. +1 On the python-list@ mailing list, we occasionally get posts from people still using Python 2.3, and regularly from people on 2.5. Stopping to apply bug fixes does not really *end* Python 2.7. It's only that people who *do* run into bugs don't have the option anymore that we will eventually publish a fixed release. Their options reduce to - port to 3.x (particularly interesting if Python 3.x *already* fixed it) - find a work-around - maintain a bug fix locally - do something else entirely (like abandoning Python) Or, if they have paid support from a vendor like Red Hat, hassle the vendor for a fix. Speaking of 2.3, as I understand it Red Hat still offer paid support for 2.3, which won't expire for a few more years, and security fixes only for some years beyond that. [By memory, which may not be entirely accurate.] -- Steven ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:51 AM, mar...@v.loewis.de wrote: Quoting Lennart Regebro rege...@gmail.com: Well... People are in general *stuck* on Python 2. They are not staying because they want to. So I'm not so sure migration rate will increase because an end is announced or reached. I assume you say that because people rely on libraries that haven't been ported (correct me if there are other reasons to be stuck). Company policies that mean you are using old distros with no support for Python 3 and not being allowed to install it from source is also a reason, but yes, the main one being libraries/frameworks, yes. With an announced end-of-life, I'm certain that migration rate will increase, because people will now urge their suppliers, pointing to the announcement. The suppliers are often people who are maintaining an open source library of some sort. When I see questions on stackoverflow about support for X on Python 3 I sometimes take a quick look of the state of libraries, check out their mailing list etc. It's *always* a problem of that the maintainers themselves are stuck on Python 2.7 or earlier together with porting being problematic. I think Python 3.3 with the u'' literal is much more important for increased adoption there than the end of life of 2.7 as it often makes porting much easier. But even so sometimes API's needs to be changed, etc, so it takes a big concerted effort of both the maintainers, and the few people that are interested in porting it to Python 3. And when you get one new person asking for Python 3 support every 6 months, that's just not enough people. That's the hangup IMO. Ending Python 2.7 will make no difference there either good or bad, I think. We need to find other ways of improving adoption. As for the company policies, in theory it sounds like a good argument that ending Python 2.7 would be incentive for these to change. But these are often slow moving companies that are happy using outdated software, and are clearly using it already, or they would be on distros that *did* support Python 3 already. :-) Nobody can *really* be stuck on a not-ported dependency, as they could always port it themselves, and even fork if the developer refuses to integrate the port (and you know that this actually happens). Yes, but time/money/knowledge is at a premium. Also self-confidence. A lot of people probably think porting is much harder than it is. :-) //Lennart ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On 07/04/13 17:52, Maciej Fijalkowski wrote: If they never migrate on the premises of python 3 being a better language what does it say about python 3? Very little. People stick with languages for all sorts of reasons, including: - It's what I know - I don't like change - That's what the client insists on - That's what my boss insists on - That's what the vendor provides - That's what my web host provides - I really love language X, but I need this *one* library that's only available on language Y, so I'm stuck I stuck with Python 1.5 for seven or eight years, and didn't migrate to Python 2 until 2.3. Why? Because that's what came standard on my Linux distro of choice. -- Steven ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:51 AM, mar...@v.loewis.de wrote: Quoting Lennart Regebro rege...@gmail.com: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:11 AM, mar...@v.loewis.de wrote: Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. Well... People are in general *stuck* on Python 2. They are not staying because they want to. So I'm not so sure migration rate will increase because an end is announced or reached. I assume you say that because people rely on libraries that haven't been ported (correct me if there are other reasons to be stuck). I'm stuck because I can't tell my users oh, we didn't improve pypy for the last year/6 months/3 months, because we were busy upgrading sources you'll never see to python 3 Cheers, fijal ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Lennart Regebro rege...@gmail.com wrote: That's the hangup IMO. Ending Python 2.7 will make no difference there either good or bad, I think. We need to find other ways of improving adoption. And to be clear: I am therefore not arguing *not* to end it. I just don't think that doing so will increase Python 3 adoption. I think that's a red herring. I have little opinion on whether to announce an official end or not, nor when. I think the burden of maintaining many branches is a much better argument, and that it therefore probably should be decided by the maintainers. //Lennart ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Maciej Fijalkowski, 07.04.2013 10:12: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:51 AM, martin...@v.loewis.de wrote: Quoting Lennart Regebro: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:11 AM, martin...@v.loewis.de wrote: Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. Well... People are in general *stuck* on Python 2. They are not staying because they want to. So I'm not so sure migration rate will increase because an end is announced or reached. I assume you say that because people rely on libraries that haven't been ported (correct me if there are other reasons to be stuck). I'm stuck because I can't tell my users oh, we didn't improve pypy for the last year/6 months/3 months, because we were busy upgrading sources you'll never see to python 3 Why not? It's not like many people *see* PyPy's sources ever in their life, but my guess is that most of your users will eventually end up *using* those upgraded sources anyway. So those upgrades will also be an improvement for most of them. Stefan ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Stefan Behnel stefan...@behnel.de wrote: Maciej Fijalkowski, 07.04.2013 10:12: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:51 AM, martin...@v.loewis.de wrote: Quoting Lennart Regebro: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:11 AM, martin...@v.loewis.de wrote: Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. Well... People are in general *stuck* on Python 2. They are not staying because they want to. So I'm not so sure migration rate will increase because an end is announced or reached. I assume you say that because people rely on libraries that haven't been ported (correct me if there are other reasons to be stuck). I'm stuck because I can't tell my users oh, we didn't improve pypy for the last year/6 months/3 months, because we were busy upgrading sources you'll never see to python 3 Why not? It's not like many people *see* PyPy's sources ever in their life, but my guess is that most of your users will eventually end up *using* those upgraded sources anyway. So those upgrades will also be an improvement for most of them. Stefan Some of them, maybe. Most people absolutely don't care. Most of my users are people who want this 10% speed improvement rather than sources upgraded to a different, supposedly better, language. Cheers, fijal ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Maciej Fijalkowski, 07.04.2013 10:37: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote: Maciej Fijalkowski, 07.04.2013 10:12: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:51 AM, martin...@v.loewis.de wrote: Quoting Lennart Regebro: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:11 AM, martin...@v.loewis.de wrote: Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. Well... People are in general *stuck* on Python 2. They are not staying because they want to. So I'm not so sure migration rate will increase because an end is announced or reached. I assume you say that because people rely on libraries that haven't been ported (correct me if there are other reasons to be stuck). I'm stuck because I can't tell my users oh, we didn't improve pypy for the last year/6 months/3 months, because we were busy upgrading sources you'll never see to python 3 Why not? It's not like many people *see* PyPy's sources ever in their life, but my guess is that most of your users will eventually end up *using* those upgraded sources anyway. So those upgrades will also be an improvement for most of them. Some of them, maybe. Most people absolutely don't care. Most of my users are people who want this 10% speed improvement rather than sources upgraded to a different, supposedly better, language. My guess is that they don't care because they don't have a choice anyway. If they want to use PyPy (because they care about this 10% speedup), then they have to stick to Python 2 as of now. Extrapolating from that that they wouldn't prefer writing Python 3 code if they could is a fallacy. Stefan ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 10:42 AM, Stefan Behnel stefan...@behnel.de wrote: Maciej Fijalkowski, 07.04.2013 10:37: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote: Maciej Fijalkowski, 07.04.2013 10:12: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:51 AM, martin...@v.loewis.de wrote: Quoting Lennart Regebro: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:11 AM, martin...@v.loewis.de wrote: Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. Well... People are in general *stuck* on Python 2. They are not staying because they want to. So I'm not so sure migration rate will increase because an end is announced or reached. I assume you say that because people rely on libraries that haven't been ported (correct me if there are other reasons to be stuck). I'm stuck because I can't tell my users oh, we didn't improve pypy for the last year/6 months/3 months, because we were busy upgrading sources you'll never see to python 3 Why not? It's not like many people *see* PyPy's sources ever in their life, but my guess is that most of your users will eventually end up *using* those upgraded sources anyway. So those upgrades will also be an improvement for most of them. Some of them, maybe. Most people absolutely don't care. Most of my users are people who want this 10% speed improvement rather than sources upgraded to a different, supposedly better, language. My guess is that they don't care because they don't have a choice anyway. If they want to use PyPy (because they care about this 10% speedup), then they have to stick to Python 2 as of now. Extrapolating from that that they wouldn't prefer writing Python 3 code if they could is a fallacy. Stefan You're completely missing what I said. I'm not arguing against providing pypy3k and we're working on it. Then users can choose. I'm arguing against me porting PyPy *source* to python3, which does not affect the language they users are using. Those are two drastically different scenarios. One is visible to users (and our plan is to support both pypy and pypy3k for the forseeable future) and the other is what developers see with really 0 visibility to the user. Cheers, fijal ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Maciej Fijalkowski, 07.04.2013 10:45: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 10:42 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote: Maciej Fijalkowski, 07.04.2013 10:37: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote: Maciej Fijalkowski, 07.04.2013 10:12: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:51 AM, martin...@v.loewis.de wrote: Quoting Lennart Regebro: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:11 AM, martin...@v.loewis.de wrote: Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. Well... People are in general *stuck* on Python 2. They are not staying because they want to. So I'm not so sure migration rate will increase because an end is announced or reached. I assume you say that because people rely on libraries that haven't been ported (correct me if there are other reasons to be stuck). I'm stuck because I can't tell my users oh, we didn't improve pypy for the last year/6 months/3 months, because we were busy upgrading sources you'll never see to python 3 Why not? It's not like many people *see* PyPy's sources ever in their life, but my guess is that most of your users will eventually end up *using* those upgraded sources anyway. So those upgrades will also be an improvement for most of them. Some of them, maybe. Most people absolutely don't care. Most of my users are people who want this 10% speed improvement rather than sources upgraded to a different, supposedly better, language. My guess is that they don't care because they don't have a choice anyway. If they want to use PyPy (because they care about this 10% speedup), then they have to stick to Python 2 as of now. Extrapolating from that that they wouldn't prefer writing Python 3 code if they could is a fallacy. You're completely missing what I said. I'm not arguing against providing pypy3k and we're working on it. Then users can choose. I'm arguing against me porting PyPy *source* to python3, which does not affect the language they users are using. Those are two drastically different scenarios. One is visible to users (and our plan is to support both pypy and pypy3k for the forseeable future) and the other is what developers see with really 0 visibility to the user. Then I don't see why that code would have to be changed at all. AFAIK, most of PyPy isn't even written in (real) Python but in RPython, which is essentially the subset of Python 2.x that PyPy can translate statically. Unless you deliberately and arbitrarily want to change RPython to be the subset of Python 3.x that PyPy can translate statically, the eventual death of Python 2 shouldn't affect that code. Stefan ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:01 PM, Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info wrote: Or, if they have paid support from a vendor like Red Hat, hassle the vendor for a fix. Speaking of 2.3, as I understand it Red Hat still offer paid support for 2.3, which won't expire for a few more years, and security fixes only for some years beyond that. [By memory, which may not be entirely accurate.] Correct, the system Python in RHEL 4 is 2.3 and that is still a supported platform if you pay for the Extended Lifecycle Support (until early next year you can still get extended support for RHEL *3*, and I believe the system Python in that is 2.2). RHEL 5 ships with 2.4 and RHEL 6 with 2.6 and those are both still in their regular support period. The system Python version in the upcoming RHEL 7 release hasn't been formally announced yet, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out what it is going to be when the system Python in Fedora is currently still Python 2.7. I'll also note that regular support for RHEL 6 doesn't end until 2020, and extended support in 2023, so even Python *2.6* should have commercial support available for another decade, let alone 2.7. These supported versions are also (or will also be) available for free through CentOS, ScientificLinux and other Red Hat derivatives. It actually isn't the bug fixes which I consider particularly important in 2.7 - it's the build fixes (including the cross-compilation support). As the IDLE team ramp up their efforts, there may also be benefit in getting updated versions of IDLE into the hands of beginners (remember, a huge amount of training is enterprise focused, which isn't likely to switch to 3.x until after Red Hat does, and that migration has barely started on the Fedora side - having the installer and package management system written in Python means that migration is likely to open up some fairly major cans of worms). Python 2.7 is a mature, stable platform for software development. Python 3.3 is *better* in most respects, but if you've already worked around (or aren't affected by) the text model issues in 2.x, then most of the cool features in 3.x are available as backported modules on PyPI. With the lifting of the language moratorium. 3.3 has taken us further down the carrot path for migration (adding the more efficient Unicode representation, the yield from notation, more memory efficient objects, import system enhancements and the improved exception hierarchy to the pre-existing carrot that is chained exceptions). 3.4 will likely add even more carrots, as we take further advantage of the cleaner code base that was gained in the 3.x migration. I think it's quite reasonable for individual committers to decide how much we want to worry about Python 2.7. I know I've fixed some bugs in 3.x and then left the issue open as still applicable to 2.7 (usually because the bug affected some part of the code that changed in the transition, so the backport isn't straightforward). I consider that a reasonable thing for me, or any other committer, to do: leave issues open as applicable to 2.7 rather than doing the backport immediately. If someone else cares enough to backport it, great, otherwise the issue is still there to indicate that the problem still exists in 2.7. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
I think the question average python users have is What's in it for me?. While the guts have undergone lots of changes, from the outside it is mostly perceived as the unicode-by-default and the print function. As per Bret's talk at pycon [1], speed is roughly the same, which is great, considering all the new stuff, but not a compelling reason to change for Joe Programmer. Joe will probably consider PyPy because moar speez is an easy sell, though. In a way, python3 is victim of the success of python2. Inertia is a powerful force, and honestly, most of the time python2 just works (easy to write, easy to modify, fast enough). Maybe it's just a marketing problem, and more examples of things you can only do with python3 are needed. Or maybe for all the good changes already there, it still needs a killer feature, i.e. the proverbial elevator pitch, that sets it apart from its older brother. Alfredo [1] http://pyvideo.org/video/1730/python-33-trust-me-its-better-than-27 ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:13 AM, Maciej Fijalkowski fij...@gmail.com wrote: For what is worth, we'll maintain the stdlib part of 2.7 past 2 years. You mean 2 years beyond 2015 (assuming that will be end-of-bugfix date)? PS: I only noticed you were talking about PyPy because I recognized your name; others won't. ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Am 07.04.13 00:37, schrieb Benjamin Peterson: What I like about 6 months is that its short enough, so we don't have feel bad about not taking a certain change; it can just be pushed to the next no-too-far-away release. A year is quite a while to wait for a fix to be released. It's also a nice timeframe for some distributions (looking at you, Ubuntu). This means that we will see two-digit micro-releases, right (assuming that there will be a few security releases)? Regards, Martin ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Am 07.04.13 11:46, schrieb Tshepang Lekhonkhobe: On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:13 AM, Maciej Fijalkowski fij...@gmail.com wrote: For what is worth, we'll maintain the stdlib part of 2.7 past 2 years. You mean 2 years beyond 2015 (assuming that will be end-of-bugfix date)? No, I think he means beyond 2 years from now, i.e. beyond 2015, i.e. after python-dev stops maintaining it, without any specific end of that support. Regards, Martin ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
I started writing this last night before the flurry of messages which arrived overnight. I thought originally, Oh, Skip, you're being too harsh. But now I'm not so sure. I think you are approaching the issue of 2.7's EOL incorrectly. Of those discussing the end of Python 2.7, how many of you still use it in your day-to-day work? Have any of you yet to move to Python 3? It sounds like many people at PyCon are still 2.x users. Where I work (a trading firm that uses Python as just one of many different pieces of technology, not a company where Python is the core technology upon which the firm is based) we are only just now migrating from 2.4 to 2.7. I can't imagine we'll have migrated to Python 3 in two years. It's not like we haven't seen this coming, but you can only justify moving so fast with technology that already works, especially if, like Python, you use it with lots of other packages (most/all of which themselves have to be ported to Python 3) and in-house software. I think the discussion should focus on who's left on 2.x and why, not, yeah, releases every six months for the next couple years ought to do it. Just my 2¢. Skip ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
2013/4/7 Martin v. Löwis mar...@v.loewis.de: Am 07.04.13 00:37, schrieb Benjamin Peterson: What I like about 6 months is that its short enough, so we don't have feel bad about not taking a certain change; it can just be pushed to the next no-too-far-away release. A year is quite a while to wait for a fix to be released. It's also a nice timeframe for some distributions (looking at you, Ubuntu). This means that we will see two-digit micro-releases, right (assuming that there will be a few security releases)? With the current proposal, 2.7.8 in 2015 would be the last non-security release. -- Regards, Benjamin ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
2013/4/7 Skip Montanaro s...@pobox.com: I started writing this last night before the flurry of messages which arrived overnight. I thought originally, Oh, Skip, you're being too harsh. But now I'm not so sure. I think you are approaching the issue of 2.7's EOL incorrectly. Of those discussing the end of Python 2.7, how many of you still use it in your day-to-day work? Have any of you yet to move to Python 3? It sounds like many people at PyCon are still 2.x users. Where I work (a trading firm that uses Python as just one of many different pieces of technology, not a company where Python is the core technology upon which the firm is based) we are only just now migrating from 2.4 to 2.7. I can't imagine we'll have migrated to Python 3 in two years. It's not like we haven't seen this coming, but you can only justify moving so fast with technology that already works, especially if, like Python, you use it with lots of other packages (most/all of which themselves have to be ported to Python 3) and in-house software. I think the discussion should focus on who's left on 2.x and why, not, yeah, releases every six months for the next couple years ought to do it. This thread is about setting CPython release schedules, so that the discussion focuses on that is unavoidable. :) I don't think the bug fix releases of CPython are critically important to the life of a Python version. Every 2.x version has survived much longer than Python-dev has done bugfixes on it. As has been noted on this thread, there will be commercial and apparently PyPy support for 2.7 long after cpython stops bug fixing it. -- Regards, Benjamin ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On 07.04.13 03:54, Raymond Hettinger wrote: On Apr 6, 2013, at 2:02 PM, Benjamin Peterson benja...@python.org mailto:benja...@python.org wrote: we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. I don't we need to make any promises beyond 5 years, but I also think it is likely the 2.7 will end-up being a long-term maintenance version of Python. At this year's Pycon keynote, I surveyed the crowd (approx 2500 people) and all almost everyone indicated that they had tried out Python 3.x and almost no one was using it in production or writing code for it. That indicates that Python 2.7 will continue to be important for a good while. In addition, the other implementations of Python (Jython, PyPy, GAE, and IronPython) are all at or nearly at Python 2.7. So, continued support will be needed for their users as well. After 2.7.4, I expect that the pace of real bug fixes will slow down, but that we'll continue to improve docs, add docstrings, update IDLE, etc. IMO, it is premature to utter the phrase the end of 2.7. Better to say, 2.7 is stable and is expected to only have minor updates. Future point releases probably ought to occur on their own schedule whenever there are a sufficient number of changes to warrant a release, or an important security fix, or whenever the release managers have time. Raimond, although I think you are right, I don't think this statement helps Python to move forward. Your vision is realistic, nevertheless I think it is important to tell everybody that 2013 is the year to move to Python 3. If enough people like you, Alex, Dabeaz, etc are claiming that loudly enough, it will eventually happen! cheers - chris -- Christian Tismer :^) mailto:tis...@stackless.com Software Consulting : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 121 :*Starship* http://starship.python.net/ 14482 Potsdam: PGP key - http://pgp.uni-mainz.de phone +49 173 24 18 776 fax +49 (30) 700143-0023 PGP 0x57F3BF04 9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619 305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04 whom do you want to sponsor today? http://www.stackless.com/ ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Hi Skip, On 07.04.13 14:10, Skip Montanaro wrote: I started writing this last night before the flurry of messages which arrived overnight. I thought originally, Oh, Skip, you're being too harsh. But now I'm not so sure. I think you are approaching the issue of 2.7's EOL incorrectly. Of those discussing the end of Python 2.7, how many of you still use it in your day-to-day work? Have any of you yet to move to Python 3? It sounds like many people at PyCon are still 2.x users. Where I work (a trading firm that uses Python as just one of many different pieces of technology, not a company where Python is the core technology upon which the firm is based) we are only just now migrating from 2.4 to 2.7. I can't imagine we'll have migrated to Python 3 in two years. It's not like we haven't seen this coming, but you can only justify moving so fast with technology that already works, especially if, like Python, you use it with lots of other packages (most/all of which themselves have to be ported to Python 3) and in-house software. I think the discussion should focus on who's left on 2.x and why, not, yeah, releases every six months for the next couple years ought to do it. when I read this, I was slightly shocked. You know what? We are pleased to announce the release of*Python 2.4, final*on November 30, 2004. I know that companies try to save (time? money?) something by not upgrading software, and this is extremely annoying. In my own project, which is for a customer, I just managed to do the complete transition from Python 2.7 to 3.3. Well, this was relatively simple because there is just my boss to be convinced, and myself, because honestly the 3.3 support is still not as good as needed. But I think every employee (including you) can quite easily put some pressure on his company by claiming that Python 2.x is a dead end, and everybody is about to move on to 3.x. This does not have to be true, I just recognize that by claiming it and doing it with your projects, the movement becomes a reality. Just say that we all need to move on and cannot care about companies that ignore this necessity. I agree it is hard to push things forward, when certain tools are just supporting 2.x. My way to get over this is ranting, and porting some things, and claiming it was a cake walk. A lie, but it helped. my 2.01 cent -- chris -- Christian Tismer :^) mailto:tis...@stackless.com Software Consulting : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 121 :*Starship* http://starship.python.net/ 14482 Potsdam: PGP key - http://pgp.uni-mainz.de phone +49 173 24 18 776 fax +49 (30) 700143-0023 PGP 0x57F3BF04 9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619 305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04 whom do you want to sponsor today? http://www.stackless.com/ ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Christian Tismer tis...@stackless.comwrote: Hi Skip, On 07.04.13 14:10, Skip Montanaro wrote: I started writing this last night before the flurry of messages which arrived overnight. I thought originally, Oh, Skip, you're being too harsh. But now I'm not so sure. I think you are approaching the issue of 2.7's EOL incorrectly. Of those discussing the end of Python 2.7, how many of you still use it in your day-to-day work? Have any of you yet to move to Python 3? It sounds like many people at PyCon are still 2.x users. Where I work (a trading firm that uses Python as just one of many different pieces of technology, not a company where Python is the core technology upon which the firm is based) we are only just now migrating from 2.4 to 2.7. I can't imagine we'll have migrated to Python 3 in two years. It's not like we haven't seen this coming, but you can only justify moving so fast with technology that already works, especially if, like Python, you use it with lots of other packages (most/all of which themselves have to be ported to Python 3) and in-house software. I think the discussion should focus on who's left on 2.x and why, not, yeah, releases every six months for the next couple years ought to do it. when I read this, I was slightly shocked. You know what? We are pleased to announce the release of *Python 2.4, final* on November 30, 2004. I know that companies try to save (time? money?) something by not upgrading software, and this is extremely annoying. You're not looking at it from the users perspective. They see: we are pleased to announce that RHEL 4 will be supported until the year 3325 and continue to use everything that it ships with and only that. its their own loss for not investing in maintaining infrastructure of their own rather than investing in a support contract from their vendor but it is a valid choice none the less. it has nothing to do with what python-dev chooses to do release wise. I think this thread has already settled the question that Benjamin set out to ask: it doesn't matter when we stop issuing bug fix releases of 2.7, users will exist long enough for even today's deniers to hate them for using an old version. If Benjamin wants to see bug fix releases made for two years, great! If not, no big deal either. We as python-dev are a bunch of volunteers and it is up to each one of us if we'll bother to continue back porting fixes or investigating bugs on 2.7 or not. I strongly suspect that many of us will only continue to do so as long as 2.7 is relevant to our day jobs. We don't need to close the 2.7 branch to commits and bug fixes. Ever. But most of us will stop caring about making changes to it at some point. For me that point is after 3.4. my 3 cents, -gps ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Am 07.04.2013 14:10, schrieb Skip Montanaro: I started writing this last night before the flurry of messages which arrived overnight. I thought originally, Oh, Skip, you're being too harsh. But now I'm not so sure. I think you are approaching the issue of 2.7's EOL incorrectly. Of those discussing the end of Python 2.7, how many of you still use it in your day-to-day work? Have any of you yet to move to Python 3? It sounds like many people at PyCon are still 2.x users. Where I work (a trading firm that uses Python as just one of many different pieces of technology, not a company where Python is the core technology upon which the firm is based) we are only just now migrating from 2.4 to 2.7. I can't imagine we'll have migrated to Python 3 in two years. You won't have to. You've been using 2.4 for 4.5 years after its last maintenance release (which was in December 2008), so by analogy you'll have until 2019 to migrate away from Python 2.7. 0.5wink Georg ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Skip Montanaro writes: It sounds like many people at PyCon are still 2.x users. I suspect we're all still 2.x users at some level. But the question is not where are the users? It's where do the development resources come from? Pretty clearly, the python-dev crowd has voted with their keyboards. You don't see a lot of complaints from committers about this policy. I gather the general feeling is that at this point supporting Python 2.x is just work that somebody else benefits from. 2.x's EOL was discussed in the past (the thread about why no 2.8?), and what we observe is nobody coming forward to maintain Python 2 for the fun of it. People not only work on Python 3 for the fun of it, but they even port packages to Python 3 for the fun of it![1] Where I work [...] it's not like we haven't seen this coming, but you can only justify moving so fast with technology that already works, But by the same token, you should be able to see quite a ways in advance when it's going to stop working, and then you can decide how you want to pay for what you'd been getting for free. As far as I can see, this is a win-win situation for Python 2 users. Stick with Python 2, which you get for free and has evolved into a robust powerful language embedded in a very rich ecosystem of add-on packages. It's open source, so you can maintain it yourself if necessary -- but it mostly *won't* be necessary. Or migrate to Python 3, which you get for free, is a better language, and whose ecosystem is advancing at a good clip. And it is much more fun to work with in many ways. Sorry-no-free-ponies-here-ly y'rs, Footnotes: [1] FVO fun including people who have done me a good turn will be happy to see this done. ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:25:12 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull step...@xemacs.org wrote: 2.x's EOL was discussed in the past (the thread about why no 2.8?), and what we observe is nobody coming forward to maintain Python 2 for the fun of it. People not only work on Python 3 for the fun of it, but they even port packages to Python 3 for the fun of it![1] Indeed. As one of the people who regularly makes commits to Python, I can say that not applying bug fixes to 2.7 will be a big relief. Having to patch 2.7 roughly doubles the time it takes to commit a fix (much more if the fix doesn't apply cleanly), and I find myself more and more likely to say well, it's been that way in Python2 for a long while, fixing it there is more likely to break things than it is to improve things, so let's not backport. Or, as gps said, just leaving the issue open to see if anyone else is willing to put in the effort to backport it. I am likely to continue to consider backporting fixes (I mostly do stdlib stuff) until Benjamin stops issuing bugfix releases, but the bar for a fix getting backported will continue to rise, and by the time of 3.4 my behavior may well be almost indistinguishable from those who are deciding to stop backporting fixes at the 3.4 boundary :) As others have pointed out, we are not talking about the end of 2.7, just of the end of python-dev doing 2.7 bugfix releases. 2.7 will live on longer than even 2.3/2.4 did, I expect, and I personally have no problem with that. My primary customers *are* using Python3, by the way. But I and they still use Python2 for lots of things, and will probably do so for a while yet. So I can also speak from a customer/consultant perspective and say that I have no problem with the impending end of 2.7 bugfix releases. In fact (except for IDLE, which I don't use myself but I really want to see improved), I would be fine if this *had* been the last 2.7 bugfix release :) --David ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Am 07.04.13 16:58, schrieb Gregory P. Smith: We don't need to close the 2.7 branch to commits and bug fixes. Ever. I wouldn't want this to happen, actually. People making changes to the 2.7 branch will want to see them released some day. The expectation is on the release people to actually make the releases. I personally want to see a fixed date when I can stop making Windows releases of 2.7, and uninstall Visual Studio 2008. So when we (Benjamin specifically) announce an end to bug fixing 2.7, I'd really like to see the branch closed for bug fixing. It may well be that another clone of cpython is established that gets bugs fixed (and perhaps even new features), but I would rather that branch not be hg.python.org/cpython. Regards, Martin ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Christian Tismer, 07.04.2013 15:53: But I think every employee (including you) can quite easily put some pressure on his company by claiming that Python 2.x is a dead end, and everybody is about to move on to 3.x. This does not have to be true, I just recognize that by claiming it and doing it with your projects, the movement becomes a reality. Just say that we all need to move on and cannot care about companies that ignore this necessity. I agree it is hard to push things forward, when certain tools are just supporting 2.x. My way to get over this is ranting, and porting some things, and claiming it was a cake walk. A lie, but it helped. +1, although I'd rather call it a self-fulfilling prophecy than a lie. Stefan ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
I have spent many years in industry working for large companies that have big, successful internal Python code bases, with dependencies on large numbers of external packages. From talking about colleagues about migrating to new language versions, several issues come forward. They all conspire to make it hard to move forward, but not impossible. - A single external package that doesn't yet support the new version can block migration until it has been ported or been replaced by something else. - Many third party packages change their API as they move forward (sometimes they are forced by changes in the language). This means trouble in the backwards compatibility department. - A migration takes a lot of effort. You have to put several engineers on it full-time who could otherwise be developing new features; and it disturbs the development activities of many other engineers, who will be asked to fix tests, decide whether something is still used, and so on. - There are probably parts of the codebase that depend extensively on some feature that doesn't work in the new version, e.g. str/unicode equivalency. Yes, that code is probably buggy, but it is heavily used, and rewriting it means changing interfaces between different components, which in turn requires more rewrites. - There are probably different departments within the company that move at different speeds. It is extremely difficult to get everyone to switch at the same time. So you have to come up with some kind of gradual transition plan, which will probably make the effort even more work, by requiring backwards compatibility for some internal interfaces. - Even if everything goes extremely smoothly, you can still count on some interruption of production -- outages, performance degradations, all the things that end users notice and gripe about. The prospect of this makes managers *very* uncomfortable. But, despite all this, migrations happen all the time, and I am sure that Python 3 will prevail as time progresses. For many *users*, Python 3 may be a distraction. But for most *developers*, maintaining 2.7 is a distraction. By and large, users of 2.7 don't need new features, they just need it to keep working. And it does, of course. (At the risk of a flawed analogy: Windows XP is still the best version of Windows for hardware built when XP was current.) But perhaps we could change the focus for 2.7 development a bit: instead of fixing bugs (or bickering about whether something is a bug fix or a new feature) we could limit changes to ensuring that it works on newer platforms. Martin mentioned that building 2.7 for Windows with the same toolchain that was used for the 2.7.0 release is getting more and more problematic. I'm not sure, but I could imagine similar problems for future versions of OS X and even Linux (though the Linux distributions typically take care of issues themselves). There's not much of a point in fixing bugs that always existed in 2.7, since must 2.7 users are by now used to working around these. However, I do see a point in supporting builds targeting newer OS versions. This won't be much of a relief for Martin, but it might be one of the best ways to interpret support of Python 2.7 for the next several years. I would also support having a 3rd party doing this and sell the binaries for a small fee (ActiveState started out this way) -- but it would still behoove us to have the necessary build files in the core repo. Some final words: if any of the alternate Python implementations (IronPython, Jython, PyPy, even Cython) are feeling down on Python 3 because they do not have enough volunteers to help with the port (even though at least for IronPython and Jython, the new str/bytes model is much more suitable than the old), they should apply to the PSF for funding. I believe PyPy is already in the process of doing so. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 11:48:28 -0400, R. David Murray rdmur...@bitdance.com wrote: (much more if the fix doesn't apply cleanly), and I find myself more and more likely to say well, it's been that way in Python2 for a long while, fixing it there is more likely to break things than it is to improve things, so let's not backport. Or, as gps said, just leaving the issue Having sent this, I noticed that it is actually a significant point that no one else has raised out, and is worth emphasising. When we fix bugs, there is always a backward compatibility estimation that goes into the fix, and whether to even make the fix in the bug fix release: what are the chances that fixing this bug will break currently working code, versus the chances that currently broken code will start working correctly? If the chance of breakage outweighs the good done, we don't apply the fix to the maintenance release. The longer that a maintenance release is in the field, the higher the probability that fixing a bug will break existing working code. So even *without* a set maintenance end date, the number of bug fixes *should* decline over time. Five years is a long time. By that point, even regardless of any maintenance commitment concerns, it is probably best to stop fixing anything except security bugs *anyway*, as a service to the user community :) --David ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
But perhaps we could change the focus for 2.7 development a bit: instead of fixing bugs (or bickering about whether something is a bug fix or a new feature) we could limit changes to ensuring that it works on newer platforms. Martin mentioned that building 2.7 for Windows with the same toolchain that was used for the 2.7.0 release is getting more and more problematic. For Windows, I don't see a way to achieve this. With the current setup of the Microsoft C runtime library, we need to continue to build with VS 2008 forever, in the 2.7 branch. While it would be possible to include project files for VS 2012 (and fix the few places where the code doesn't work on VS 2012), this wouldn't help: If we release 2.7.5 (say) built with VS 2012 (say), then existing third-party extension modules may break (depending how precisely they use the CRT). Likewise, if a user choses to rebuild Python with VS 2012 themselves, they really ought to rebuild all extension modules that they use as well. They probably won't recognize this requirement, and then debug difficult-to-understand issues. IOW, to update the tool chain, we would really have to call it python28.dll (or start with a new approach of calling it python27vs11.dll, which would create distinct universes where each extension needs to be built for each universe). So I believe that extension building is becoming more and more painful on Windows for Python 2.7 as time passes (and it is already way more painful than it is on Linux), and I see no way to do much about that. The stable ABI would have been a solution, but it's too late now for 2.7. Regards, Martin ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Apr 06, 2013, at 05:02 PM, Benjamin Peterson wrote: This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. I'm all for putting stakes in the ground and clearly describing the future life of Python 2.7, rather than the current indefinite status quo. We talked about this at Pycon, and a final maintenance release of 2.7 when 3.4 is released, plus a few years of security-only source-only releases after that seems entirely reasonable. I would like to make a definitive statement as to 2.7's EOL because I think that will spur more people to work on porting. Just as 3.3 makes porting easier than 3.2, I expect that as more people see the writing on the wall, and we've reached the Python 3 tipping point (e.g. wos now means wall of superpowers :) we'll get even more feedback on porting difficulties that can be alleviated in 3.4. (Example, I was against re-adding the u-prefix, but I was wrong!) Thankfully, after October, I won't have to worry about 2.6 any more. -Barry ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Apr 06, 2013, at 06:54 PM, Raymond Hettinger wrote: At this year's Pycon keynote, I surveyed the crowd (approx 2500 people) and all almost everyone indicated that they had tried out Python 3.x and almost no one was using it in production or writing code for it. That indicates that Python 2.7 will continue to be important for a good while. Now that porting has reached the top of the food chain (e.g. Twisted, Django) I think these numbers will change. Some from porters, but also from new projects which can start with a clean slate and avoid endless UncodeErrors and rafts of other problems. This will produce downward pressure on lagging libraries to adopt Python 3 or get left behind, and that should increase the momentum. Python 3 *is* being used in production, but today it's limited to new code bases and ports where all the dependencies are already there. Now we're identifying key bottlenecks, such as (for us) Xapian, and places in the language or libraries where more help is needed. Some bottlenecks have already been fixed (e.g. for us, dbus and OAuth, where the most popular library is already abandoned upstream for 4 years, but there is thankfully a great replacement that's Python 3 compatible). I talked to someone at Pycon who was still using Python 1.5, which is probably older than some of the people on this list ;). -Barry ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On 08/04/13 07:41, Barry Warsaw wrote: I talked to someone at Pycon who was still using Python 1.5, which is probably older than some of the people on this list ;). Awesome! :-) -- Steven ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Barry Warsaw writes: I would like to make a definitive statement as to 2.7's EOL because I think that will spur more people to work on porting. I have to agree with the people who say that it's not a major spur. Internal support for existing Python 2.7 installations is by now quite a bit less than a full-time job (at least the part corresponding to what python-dev does for a version in late maintenance releases[1]). I don't see how it makes the choice between sticking with 2.7 vs. contributing ports to 3.x more stark than it already is. Of course it does free up core developer time, especially the release engineers. In maintaining 2.7 past 2015, are core developers really doing anything that a business can't do cheaply and with maximum social benefit?[2] Footnotes: [1] Maybe the Windows build process brings it close to that order of magnitude, if users are building internally. But this should be a saleable product. [2] It has been proved that open source development styles *do* provide benefits *beyond* what business can profitably provide, because of network externalities among developers and users, especially the ability of user-developers to contribute. But these benefits mostly disappear when the developer-vs-user externality disappears because the spec is fixed, and the implementation 99.44% corresponds to the spec. ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 12:58 AM, Gregory P. Smith g...@krypto.org wrote: You're not looking at it from the users perspective. They see: we are pleased to announce that RHEL 4 will be supported until the year 3325 and continue to use everything that it ships with and only that. its their own loss for not investing in maintaining infrastructure of their own rather than investing in a support contract from their vendor but it is a valid choice none the less. it has nothing to do with what python-dev chooses to do release wise. Right, people pay companies like Red Hat* good money to support ancient versions of open source software. Upstream doesn't want to do that (because it's tedious and not at all interesting), and *they don't have to*. If people want things that volunteers aren't interested in providing, then they have the option to pay to get the software they want on the platforms they want (note that in the later parts of a supported product's life, even we don't support running ancient versions of RHEL directly on new hardware - we only support running it as a VM inside a supported hypervisor that supports the new hardware). * In case anyone in the thread isn't already aware of my multiple perspectives on this issue, note that I work on internal tools development for Red Hat these days. We don't need to close the 2.7 branch to commits and bug fixes. Ever. But most of us will stop caring about making changes to it at some point. +1000 For me that point is after 3.4. In terms of most of the stuff I work on that isn't a new feature, it's either obscure enough, different enough between 2.x and 3.x or close enough to the new feature line that I don't really care about getting it changed in 2.7. So for me personally, the stop worrying about fixing 2.7 point is mostly passed already (fixing aspects of the 2.7 *ecosystem* is still thoroughly on my radar, but that's about improving external tools, not CPython itself). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Am 06.04.2013 23:02, schrieb Benjamin Peterson: Per my last message, 2.7.4 has at long last been released. I apologize for the long interval between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4. To create more determinism in the future, I will be soon updating PEP 373 with approximate dates of future 2.7 bugfix releases. I will be aiming for 6 month intervals. This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. At any rate, 2.7.0 was released in July 2010, which currently puts us within a few months of 3 years of maintenance. Over the past year, I've been happy to see a lot of movement towards 3 including the porting of important codebases like Twisted and Django. However, there's also no doubt that 2.x is still widely used. Obviously, there will be people who would be happy if we kept maintaining 2.7 until 2025, but I think at this juncture 5 total years of maintenance is reasonable. This means there will be approximately 4 more 2.7 releases. Thoughts? I agree that keeping to 5 years of official maintenance releases is reasonable at present. However, in 2015 I can well imagine offers from group(s) in the community to maintain the 2.7 branch with fixes ported from 3.x. At that point, we will have to decide how to treat releases from this backports branch. Georg ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sat, 6 Apr 2013 17:02:17 -0400 Benjamin Peterson benja...@python.org wrote: Obviously, there will be people who would be happy if we kept maintaining 2.7 until 2025, but I think at this juncture 5 total years of maintenance is reasonable. This means there will be approximately 4 more 2.7 releases. Thoughts? That's quite fine with me. Regards Antoine. ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Am 06.04.2013 23:11, schrieb Georg Brandl: Am 06.04.2013 23:02, schrieb Benjamin Peterson: Per my last message, 2.7.4 has at long last been released. I apologize for the long interval between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4. To create more determinism in the future, I will be soon updating PEP 373 with approximate dates of future 2.7 bugfix releases. I will be aiming for 6 month intervals. This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. At any rate, 2.7.0 was released in July 2010, which currently puts us within a few months of 3 years of maintenance. Over the past year, I've been happy to see a lot of movement towards 3 including the porting of important codebases like Twisted and Django. However, there's also no doubt that 2.x is still widely used. Obviously, there will be people who would be happy if we kept maintaining 2.7 until 2025, but I think at this juncture 5 total years of maintenance is reasonable. This means there will be approximately 4 more 2.7 releases. Thoughts? I agree that keeping to 5 years of official maintenance releases is reasonable at present. However, in 2015 I can well imagine offers from group(s) in the community to maintain the 2.7 branch with fixes ported from 3.x. At that point, we will have to decide how to treat releases from this backports branch. Five years official releases sounds fine to me, too. Martin, how long are you going to build official Windows binaries for Python 2.7? Christian ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
I agree with Benjamin though is it really necessary to do two 2.7 releases a year for the last two years? that's rather rapid (but as the release manager its your call). A few of us (sorry I forgot who all was there though I think Martin was?) had a discussion at PyCon a few weeks ago and seemed to think that a state of affairs where a 2.7.5 release one year-ish from now would be fine as the last _binary_ release but that continuing to make a 2.7.6 and beyond as source only releases was reasonable. Regardless, the 5 years of 2.7 supported releases plan still makes sense regardless of release binaries being available for windows and mac or not. -gps On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 3:05 PM, Christian Heimes christ...@python.orgwrote: Am 06.04.2013 23:11, schrieb Georg Brandl: Am 06.04.2013 23:02, schrieb Benjamin Peterson: Per my last message, 2.7.4 has at long last been released. I apologize for the long interval between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4. To create more determinism in the future, I will be soon updating PEP 373 with approximate dates of future 2.7 bugfix releases. I will be aiming for 6 month intervals. This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. At any rate, 2.7.0 was released in July 2010, which currently puts us within a few months of 3 years of maintenance. Over the past year, I've been happy to see a lot of movement towards 3 including the porting of important codebases like Twisted and Django. However, there's also no doubt that 2.x is still widely used. Obviously, there will be people who would be happy if we kept maintaining 2.7 until 2025, but I think at this juncture 5 total years of maintenance is reasonable. This means there will be approximately 4 more 2.7 releases. Thoughts? I agree that keeping to 5 years of official maintenance releases is reasonable at present. However, in 2015 I can well imagine offers from group(s) in the community to maintain the 2.7 branch with fixes ported from 3.x. At that point, we will have to decide how to treat releases from this backports branch. Five years official releases sounds fine to me, too. Martin, how long are you going to build official Windows binaries for Python 2.7? Christian ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/greg%40krypto.org ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
2013/4/6 Gregory P. Smith g...@krypto.org: I agree with Benjamin though is it really necessary to do two 2.7 releases a year for the last two years? that's rather rapid (but as the release manager its your call). What I like about 6 months is that its short enough, so we don't have feel bad about not taking a certain change; it can just be pushed to the next no-too-far-away release. A year is quite a while to wait for a fix to be released. It's also a nice timeframe for some distributions (looking at you, Ubuntu). -- Regards, Benjamin ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
In article capzv6o-r_z1mr+kjn8jb5zvxmvuexsaltuhhjboj_wekvu9...@mail.gmail.com, Benjamin Peterson benja...@python.org wrote: 2013/4/6 Gregory P. Smith g...@krypto.org: What I like about 6 months is that its short enough, so we don't have feel bad about not taking a certain change; it can just be pushed to the next no-too-far-away release. A year is quite a while to wait for a fix to be released. It's also a nice timeframe for some distributions (looking at you, Ubuntu). +1 to both a 6-month release interval and to soon announcing a date for the last maintenance release that is no later than 2015. As Georg points out, though, there undoubtedly will be pushback on that so we should make sure we have a good story for what happens after that date and we start communicating it in plenty of time. An important of that is emphasizing what will be available on Python 3.x by then and figuring out what to do about any important missing pieces, e.g. key third-party components not yet ported. -- Ned Deily, n...@acm.org ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Apr 6, 2013, at 2:02 PM, Benjamin Peterson benja...@python.org wrote: we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. I don't we need to make any promises beyond 5 years, but I also think it is likely the 2.7 will end-up being a long-term maintenance version of Python. At this year's Pycon keynote, I surveyed the crowd (approx 2500 people) and all almost everyone indicated that they had tried out Python 3.x and almost no one was using it in production or writing code for it. That indicates that Python 2.7 will continue to be important for a good while. In addition, the other implementations of Python (Jython, PyPy, GAE, and IronPython) are all at or nearly at Python 2.7. So, continued support will be needed for their users as well. After 2.7.4, I expect that the pace of real bug fixes will slow down, but that we'll continue to improve docs, add docstrings, update IDLE, etc. IMO, it is premature to utter the phrase the end of 2.7. Better to say, 2.7 is stable and is expected to only have minor updates. Future point releases probably ought to occur on their own schedule whenever there are a sufficient number of changes to warrant a release, or an important security fix, or whenever the release managers have time. Raymond -- PYTHON 2.7 I'm not dead! CART DRIVER 'Ere. He says he's not dead. LARGE MAN Yes he is. PYTHON 2.7 I'm not! CART DRIVER He isn't. LARGE MAN He will be soon. He's very ill. PYTHON 2.7 I'm getting better! LARGE MAN You're not. You'll be stone dead in a few minutes. ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On 4/6/2013 5:11 PM, Georg Brandl wrote: Am 06.04.2013 23:02, schrieb Benjamin Peterson: Per my last message, 2.7.4 has at long last been released. I apologize for the long interval between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4. To create more determinism in the future, I will be soon updating PEP 373 with approximate dates of future 2.7 bugfix releases. I will be aiming for 6 month intervals. In 6 months, there will be a bunch more IDLE fixes (there are already some that were too late for today's releases), so that will be good from that standpoint. Some people will continue teaching with 2.7 for who knows how long. I expect Idle to be considerably polished within 2 years. This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. At any rate, 2.7.0 was released in July 2010, which currently puts us within a few months of 3 years of maintenance. Over the past year, I've been happy to see a lot of movement towards 3 including the porting of important codebases like Twisted and Django. However, there's also no doubt that 2.x is still widely used. Obviously, there will be people who would be happy if we kept maintaining 2.7 until 2025, but I think at this juncture 5 total years of maintenance is reasonable. This means there will be approximately 4 more 2.7 releases. Thoughts? I agree that keeping to 5 years of official maintenance releases is reasonable at present. I do not remember if there was any promise of security fixes after 5 years. However, in 2015 I can well imagine offers from group(s) in the community to maintain the 2.7 branch with fixes ported from 3.x. I can imagine that. And I can imagine no volunteers ;-). I think that volunteering after the mid-2015 5-year release is too late in a sense. Anybody who thinks they will want to prolong maintenance should start working *now* to test bugfix patches on 2.7 and re-write as necessary and earn core-developer status. I think this should be suggested/publicized now. Unless Benjamin volunteers to continue doing releases, at least one new volunteer needs to learn how to do them, perhaps by working with him on some the the remaining releases he does do. At that point, we will have to decide how to treat releases from this backports branch. If there are at least a couple of people with 2.7 branch push privileges, who understand and agree to follow 'bugfixes only', with due consideration of back-compatibility, then I see no reason for such releases not to be official PSF releases. If some people take up 2.7 after the final 2.7 release and work independently us, then it is out of our hands. (And they will have to call their releases something other than 'Python 2.7.z') -- Terry Jan Reedy ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Benjamin Peterson benja...@python.org wrote: juncture 5 total years of maintenance is reasonable. This means there will be approximately 4 more 2.7 releases. That's good. From the subject of the email, I though you were announcing This is the end of 2.7.x releases. 2 more year with 6 month cycle seem to be a good one. Thank you! Senthil ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 7:02 AM, Benjamin Peterson benja...@python.org wrote: Per my last message, 2.7.4 has at long last been released. I apologize for the long interval between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4. To create more determinism in the future, I will be soon updating PEP 373 with approximate dates of future 2.7 bugfix releases. I will be aiming for 6 month intervals. This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. At any rate, 2.7.0 was released in July 2010, which currently puts us within a few months of 3 years of maintenance. Over the past year, I've been happy to see a lot of movement towards 3 including the porting of important codebases like Twisted and Django. However, there's also no doubt that 2.x is still widely used. Obviously, there will be people who would be happy if we kept maintaining 2.7 until 2025, but I think at this juncture 5 total years of maintenance is reasonable. This means there will be approximately 4 more 2.7 releases. Thoughts? This aligns well with what I've been telling people for the past couple of years, so +1 from me. Commercial Linux distros will also offer 2.7 support out beyond 2015, and it seems to me that the intersection between needs Python 2.7 support beyond 2015 and is willing to pay for that support is likely to be pretty high. If the demand is there on the Windows side, then I expect companies like ActiveState and Enthought will also be happy to oblige. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Python-Dev] The end of 2.7
Quoting Benjamin Peterson benja...@python.org: This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. I'd like to promote the idea to abandon 2.7 bug fix releases earlier than that, e.g. along with the release of 3.4. My recollection is that we didn't actually promise any specific time frame; I recall that Guido said that Python 2.7 would be supported indefinitely, which is not infinitely [1]. The Whats New says [2] It’s very likely the 2.7 release will have a longer period of maintenance compared to earlier 2.x versions. which explicitly refuses to set a date. Of course, individual committers may have promised a more specific policy publicly in the past. Since Christian asked: I'll likely continue to make binary releases for Windows as along as Benjamin declares releases to be bug fix releases. However, it will become increasingly difficult for users to actually use these releases to build extension modules since Microsoft decided to take VS 2008 Express offline (VS 2008 remains available to MSDN subscribers; getting it from a store might also be difficult in 2014). I wonder whether the burden of maintaining three branches for bug fixes (2.7, 3.3, default) and three more for security fixes (2.6, 3.1, 3.2) is really sustainable for committers. I wouldn't want to back off wrt. security fixes, and 2.6 will soon fall out of the promised 5 years (after the initial release). However, stopping to accept bug fixes for 2.7 would IMO significantly reduce the load for committers - it would certainly continue to get security fixes, and (for the time being) indefinitely so. Wrt. to the 3.x migration rate: I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Migration rate will certainly increase once we announce an end of 2.7, and then again when the end is actually reached. I'm doubtful with respect to a community-managed ongoing 2.7 bug fix release (i.e. I doubt that it will happen); the same was discussed for a next 2.x feature release, and it hasn't happened. OTOH, it is very likely that people will publish their own patches to 2.7 throughout the net, just as the Linux distributions already do. It may even happen that some volunteer offers to publish a combined repository for such patches, with various members of the community having write access to such a repository (but no formal releases coming out of that). Regards, Martin [1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-November/093651.html [2] http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.7.html#the-future-for-python-2-x ___ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
