If the change goes through, couldn't you just use older Python versions for those specific projects, or has the Python ecosystem still not figured out how to do this without huge hassles?
Python is open source. Nothing prohibits you from forking the 2.7 codebase and adding your own security patches (or more substantial things like back-porting new OpenSSL support, or even cherry-picking backwards-compatible features from 3.x that you do like), for example.
I'm happy when people criticize new features in Python. But I expect to read criticism of features based on their actual merits and consequences, not on the principle that it's new or backwards-incompatible or would cause "churn".
Then we have people saying "just don't upgrade anything if you don't want to deal with the churn" but that too is a very large burden for all the reasons I mentioned.
All the reasonable adults in the room want option 3: don't do the thing that causes needless churn.
> But I expect to read criticism of features based on their actual merits and consequences, not on the principle that it's new or backwards-incompatible or would cause "churn".
I am honestly shocked to see this attitude. Churn is a very real consequence. Do you have no respect for the time of the countless devs who use python?
It's bizarre to me that expecting people to improve their code incrementally is considered a disrespect for their time.
The proposed change is not arbitrary - which can be seen by trying to imagine the alternate universe in which the reverse change were proposed. One can imagine a world in which `except:` were added to a Python that didn't support it, but certainly not one where it were made mandatory (whether for the `except BaseException:` case or the `except Exception:` case).
I assume there are people out there who would, similarly, argue that it was "needless" to make `print` into a function (and thereby break users of the `>>file` syntax). But it demonstrably and significantly makes the language better.
Imagine whatever universe you want, but we live in this one. In this universe, there is a shitload of old python. Python 2.7 isn't even completely gone. Literal lifetimes of collective time would be spent on the fallout of this change, which does not seem worth the reward.
How could the people maintaining Python possibly avoid that? It would be up to Apple to proactively reach out to affected projects, if Apple cares about that.