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It does talk to a package server, but you'll want to grab all the source code/wheels for the relevant packages before they are no longer available anyway, especially as many projects are no longer going to be available under Python 2.

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Interesting. I imagine what may have to happen is someone will (perhaps for profit) do all of the heavy lifting here so companies can use their server for old packages.

I get expecting that everyone will do this on their own, I just don’t think it will happen that way.

The default backend of pip is pypi. Pypi does not have a policy of removing previous releases (though package authors do have the ability to do this I believe). There are packages going back a really long time. You can find releases for Python 2.6 (EOL 2013) that were published in 2012 still on pypi (and accessible by pip).

In addition, paid extended support for Python 2.7 already exists from 3rd party vendors (I know of ActivePython) - Python 2 EOL just means you don't get free updates and supports.

PyPI may exist and hold old packages, but even that will eventually bitrot, and the API that the old version of pip uses to download files may no longer exist in the future (as an example).

For those cases you will want to make sure you have a local mirror.

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