Knocking Python 2 off the desktop iso

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mar 08, 2016, at 08:08 PM, Sebastien Bacher wrote:

>Do we plan to reduce/drop support for python2.7 if we get it out of the
>iso? Or what's the direct result out of those efforts out of sending a
>message and winning some CD space?

It's not much more than that for right now.  We won't drop support for Python
2.7 and it will remain in main for 16.04.  Deprecating it further
(e.g. pushing it off to universe) is a much longer term task due in part to
the Debian Python toolchain.

As Neal points out, Python 2.7 will stop being supported upstream for bug
fixes in 2020[*] which puts it past 16.04's lifetime, but I suspect it will
still be supported upstream for security fixes, source-only for several years
after that.  (That's just my guess, as I'm not the 2.7 release manager.)

I do think the message is important though, and I'm personally disappointed we
couldn't quite get there, but I defer to the desktop team on the trade-off
between usability for our Windows friends, and the long-term roadmap of a Python
3 world.  Samba is just too big blocker for all the distros right now, so
that's something we should try to help with in the future.

Let's keep beating the drum though - it's long past time to port your
libraries and applications to Python 3.

Cheers,
-Barry

[*] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/