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Comment by digitalsushi | Hacker News Reader

I never knew if this was a cynic's answer or truthful, but I was told by my manager at one point that RedHat's OS is superglued to python2 and spends a lot of money to keep python2 in good working order. I highly expect it's a cynic's response and please read it as such until someone in-the-know can retort my post.

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I don't think that's true, or at least it's no longer true: RHEL 8 does not ship with Python 2 by default. https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/11/14/python-in-rhel... Red Hat software that depends on Python, like yum, is in Python 3.

I think it is true (as of pretty recently) that Red Hat is the only company employing a Python core dev to work on Python core dev stuff full time (see https://discuss.python.org/t/official-list-of-core-developer...). But the core dev team is focused on Python 3, so that isn't a sign of Red Hat's Python 2 commitment either.

Red Hat has long support contracts for their server OSes that shipped with Python 2 when it was still kosher to do so.

That means they'll patch Python 2 should vulnerabilities be found on their OS.

It’s a pain from the outside looking into their business. Their contracts, though, are their business.

Those support contracts aren't cheap, though. I don't think they're getting the short end of the stick here. If anything, the companies that run lots of Python 2 code in the house that haven't migrated yet - which is not uncommon in the enterprise - have the incentive to run that code on RedHat, if they aren't doing so already.

I wouldn't even be surprised if they provide support contracts specifically for Python 2 on their newer OSes. ActiveState announced that they'll continue providing paid support for Python 2 on all platforms, so some people at least feel like there's a business model there...

https://www.activestate.com/company/press/press-releases/act...

See the RHEL release schedule:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Versi...

RHEL 6/7 and Centos 6/7 will support Python 2 until at least mid-2024.

There was no way updating the system Python in Rh/CentOS6 from 2.6 to 2.7 as that broke system scripts. You could only use 2.7 in non-standard paths (or Python 3).

A lot of tooling (yum, for example) was written in python. This all takes a lot of time to port, especially gtk/gobject stuff, but nowadays this is all written for python3 or JavaScript or Vala.

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