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And yet a transition period is needed.

I wonder what about this made this difficult. Was it because it's a language interpreter? Libraries have this problem sometimes, but not as much. (I never hear of issues with gstreamer between 0.10 and 1.0, for example.) Maybe it was just that a binary called python existed? Maybe we should have just said "screw it, python means python2, end of story."

Don't know. What would you have preferred?

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Well, in my ideal world maintainers would have put all possible effort to porting libraries to python 3 and put python 2 versions into legacy mode (e.g.: security updates, fork it if you want to continue on the 2-branch).

In my field what seemed to keep people on python 2 for a long time was numpy or scipy (or both, I do not remember which) which did not get a 3 upgrade for a long time.

Either that, or just call it something different, kind of like perl6. There is no perl6 distribution shipping a perl library or some perl.dll that clashes with perl5.

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