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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

> Feel free to use and maintain Python 2 indefinitely or move to a different language. Most of the rest of us will move on since the conversions were not that hard and the improvements worth it and we were given 10+ years to do it.

Maintaining Python 2 indefinitely is an option actively being taken away from people. More importantly, fuck anyone who wants to direct my budget! There's things written in Python 2 ages ago that don't justify additional developer time in my company. Except the community is making us do it.

If you think migrating some ancient Django app to modern Django is trivially easy, why don't you come do it for us?

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> Maintaining Python 2 indefinitely is an option actively being taken away from people

Where do you see this happening? All I see are people and organizations deciding that they don't want to do the work of maintaining Python 2.

Python 2 removed from homebrew.

Python 2.7 is not getting any security/crypto updates backported. Eventually PyPI's SSL configuration will change to a point where Python 2.7 won't handle it and then that's it. Game over, no more pip for you, even if you froze on < 21.0.

There are Linux distros out there in LTS until late into this decade that shipped with Python 2.7. Ubuntu 18 comes to mind, which EOLs in 2028. They've got a real hard problem to solve.

Python 2.7 is not getting any security/crypto updates backported.

There are several projects out there that are supporting python 2.7 with security updates. Tauthon is probably the biggest one.

Thank you. Yes it is good to see some projects stepping up the fill the gaps. I only wonder as time goes on how well socialized these will be...and if people who suddenly find themselves in the position of maintaining an old Python code base will be able to find out what to do.

Tauthon is kind of interesting because in addition to guaranteeing compatibility with the latest official 2.7 release they are also trying to back-port as many python 3 feature as makes sense without breaking the backwards comparability.

Oh, you mean other people maintaining Python 2 for you is being taken away.

You can maintain Python 2 yourself just fine, though, if you like.

heh

You can even still get someone else to maintain it for you! Just not the Python Software Foundation. If it's an important piece of your business it may make sense to have a support contract in place regardless.

How does that "actively take away from people the option to maintain Python 2 indefinitely"?

It appears to only take away from people the option to use the unmaintained Python 2.

But if the libraries and extensions are not maintaining compatibility, you need to freeze your dependencies, and sometimes that means freezing the dependencies of your dependencies, or even your OS, and then you hope your machine doesn't break.

It's not a tragedy, backwards-compatibility is a burden, and I understand maintainers, especially volunteers not wanting to do it. But migration is a pain, I found the conversion was not too hard, but testing the migrated scripts for breakage was time consuming.

FYI, the cause of my latest migration was that the latest version for the mysql-connector for python no longer works with 2.7. See the changelog entry for v8.0.24 here: https://github.com/mysql/mysql-connector-python/blob/master/...

So something to consider if you want to stay on Python 2 forever.

>More importantly, fuck anyone who wants to direct my budget!

Is your budget going at all to maintaining Python 2 or the ancient Django you use? I'm gonna guess not.

If my local electronics shop can still operate fine on win3.1 I'd imagine that there's a fair amount of places where no maintenance at all will be needed

If anything, this is the normal state of things in business.

We all know about how COBOL is alive and kicking but Python's core team decided that reality doesn't apply to them.

Sure, IBM will gladly sell you an up-to-date COBOL. Just like someone will gladly sell you an up-to-date Python2. It ain't free.

Nobody forced the upgrade to COBOL and it still runs just like you can still run whatever old version of Python you're tied to, with the same downsides as if you ran an ancient version of COBOL.

No that's the point. It's something that doesn't make sense to spend any more money on. It's a tool that's being replaced but that process takes years. Unfortunately not soon enough before the end of Python 2.

Python 2 isn't going to just stop working. You just have to accept the downsides if you're not willing to budget for migrating.

You chose to wait this long. You could have spent a little budget to maintain your software but you didn't and now you're paying the price.

How much are you paying for Python again?

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