Even if it's just security fixes, there's still the process of testing and release management, and honestly, I don't blame the core Python team for no longer wanting to do release management of both Python 2 and 3.
It was also posted in this thread below by the current maintainer of the project but for some reason that comment was downvoted to [dead].
By reading a bit around about it, i do get the impression that the Tauthon developers face a bit of hostility from the Python community, so i'm not sure how viable it'll be in the long term. I suppose it depends on how stubborn the Tauthon developers are :-P
(Unlike other forums, banned users can still post, but their posts require someone with showdead on to vouch for it before it can be seen).
Also the longer a software is around, the lower the chance of some showstopper showing up (not 0% chance though)
What's most likely is that one important library in 2.7 stops talking to some upgraded system version (think OpenSSL for example) then what depends on it stops working.
That's opensource in a nutshell.
If there are any big shops stuck on Python 2 then they will probably throw a resource or two at this. If there are big dists using Python 2 they will do the same.
Which, I'd guess, is probably gonna be 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more money than they've ever spent supporting Python2 (or 3) devs in the 10+ years they've built their own businesses on it while they sat on their hands and ignored the project's urging to upgrade to Python3...
Not a lot of sympathy from me for "big shops stuck on Python2"...
The Python foundation is threatening to sue anyone continuing something called Python 2, or even a similar name.
Finding volunteers who are willing to get sued to work on Python will be hard.
What's "in it" for the volunteer? How much "fun" does "Supporting an old language where the original developers have moved on to a newer and more interesting version of the language, but there's a bunch of complaining people who still want the old language to be supported but they aren't offering to pay for it" sound? I'd rather sit in the park reading a book or walk a dog or something.
I mean, there's still people taking on COBOL contracts, because businesses consider their COBOL code to be important enough to keep maintained. But they sure as hell aren't "volunteering". They're getting paid rates that even bay area twenty-something FAANG-ers would be impressed by.
If Blackrock or The Vanguard Group or equivalent decided they needed continued Python2 support because it was a critical dependency on their ETF platforms (and they'd been foolish enough to not heed the "Goddamn it, just fucking upgrade to Python3 already!" advice from the core team for about a decade), I'm sure they could whip out their chequebooks and agree to a rate that Guido himself would agree support Python2 for them. But I'd hope and expect Guido (or whoever in the core team would be suitable candidates to do this work) to hold out for genuinely life-changing numbers of zeros on those cheques.
And if nobody is offering to write those cheques? Well maybe that says something about the seriousness of their complaints?
I 100% agree. I was just responding to the parent post.
While I generally share your POV, it doesn’t do justice to the situation to trivialize the upgrade like that. Anyone with C based dependencies will have a rougher time (but not that “rough”) due to ABI changes. The harder userland change is string handling anyway (which isn’t that hard either), not parens on print.
I understand using trademark as an advantage in cases of a hostile fork, but if the original maintainer no longer plan to do any bugfixing then it seems like a dick move.
They do have issue with people using a trademarked name and not making it clear that their work isn't endorsed by the Python Foundation.
[1] https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/
If I'm not allowed to do that, then you are already adding a lot of friction to continuing to support existing python installs.
Although, I wonder if you could claim you need to call it that for the programs to work?
> Use of the word "Python" in the names of freely distributed products like IronPython, wxPython, Python Extensions, etc. -- Allowed when referring to use with or suitability for the Python programming language.
We can quibble about whether a Python 2 fork would technically meet the definition here, but it seems to me that it would meet it at least as much as IronPython does; going after such a fork would contradict the rule implied by the examples in this section, even if it doesn't unambiguously violate the definition. I think they've already granted the public the right to use the word "Python" in a Python 2 fork and couldn't successfully sue over it now even if they wanted to.
What's your basis for suggesting that they've threatened to do so?
I know this has come up at least three times I've seen, but I'm having trouble finding them all. Here's one:
https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/issues/47
In this case there was plans to call something py28, to which Guido replied "OK, bring in the lawyers".
""" Since I was asked: The project's name (and its binary name) need to change. They are misleading. The rest looks acceptable according to Python's license. This is not an endorsement (far from it). """
---
gvanrossum: Isn't the whole point that we're trying to solve this without lawyers?
[redacted]: The whole point is that you've been sabotaging Python 2 for years and when someone does what needed to be done from the start, you come up with silly objections.
gvanrossum: OK, bring in the lawyers.
---
Just don’t appropriate a name what’s not yours, and you can maintain all the Python 2.x you want. Pathfinder[1] couldn’t call itself D&D 3.6 – Tauthon or anyone else can’t make things called Python.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_Roleplaying_Game