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Comment by jeffrallen | Hacker News Reader

Great, so now not only Python will be incompatible with itself, but also incompatible with itself even if you use Python 3.

Sigh.

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Or, the glass half full view of the world suggests that low usage high barrier to maintenance module deprecation increases overall long term improvements and compatibility at the cost of small, planned, notified, short term inconvenience.

I think you're missing the point. Nothing is wrong with deprecation, but it should be done properly. Ideally, breaking changes should correspond to a major version increase

You should sign up to maintain those ancient modules

Why do they need to be maintained? Just leave them as is.

Code rots.

Because supposedly people will report bugs for them and someone will need to fix them.

“Sorry, we don't fix bugs in deprecated code. Closed.”

“Deprecated” usually implies intent to remove. Regardless, even dealing with such rejections is a support burden. And security vulnerabilities will tend to be fixed, even in deprecated code.

Apart from requiring security fixes, they also sometimes block changes and newer features. At that point, the maintainers might have to choose between breaking the obsolete module or shelfing the feature/fix.

Deprecations are the way to indicate that support for the module will be eventually dropped. There is no reason to leave those modules there if they cannot be relied on.

Several groups of people offered to maintain python 2. They were told very clearly they could not do so "officially", and we're even threatened with lawyers if their thing looked like it could be mistaken for "Python 2".

So don’t maintain it officially and use a different name. What’s your complaint exactly?

Do you have pointers to that? The one I saw was called “python 2.8” which is definitely a point of confusion for people who might think it was supported.

Look up Tauthon , believe that was the name.

Yes, that’s the one. Note that they’re still there – the PSF just didn’t want them calling something which isn’t made by the Python developers Python 2.8. Once they adopted the Tauthon name they were fine.

Here's an actively maintained version of Python 2:

https://www.activestate.com/products/python/python-2-7/

As you can see, it is still offered, and the PSF doesn't have a problem with that.

The problem with those other groups is that they didn't want to maintain Python 2. They wanted to take it and develop it, evolving the language separately from Python 3 - while also calling the result "Python 2.8" (and presumably later Python 2.9 etc). It stands to reason that people who own the brand don't want it to be associated with a third-party fork that's making its own major design decisions, no?

I genuinely thought some people wanted to do this, but we're refused, so I've learnt I was wrong.

It would be nice if this was linked from python.org as well.

Have you tried Lua.. they brake for noone..

What? Lua has breaking changes every release.

Exactly.

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