[gentoo-dev-announce] Python 2.7 cleanup: plan B

[gentoo-dev-announce] Python 2.7 cleanup: plan B

[Michał Górny]

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Hi, everyone.

TL;DR: we might keep Python 2.7 supported as a build-time dependency
of a few packages as necessary, while removing the eclass support for
installing packages for py2.7.


As I've mentioned earlier, the plan is to get rid of Python 2.7 target
support at the beginning of 2021.  The plan was to last rite all
remaining packages failing to support Python 3 at 2021-01-01, and remove
the eclass support on 2021-02-15.  At the same time, the Python
interpreter was going to stay around for as long as necessary.

I've also mentioned that there is a high risk that this will not be
possible because of a few large entities ignoring the problem
and failing to port their build system scripts away from Python 2.
We can't really last rite all major web browsers, and postponing
the deadline indefinitely is not a good solution either.

Therefore, I advise the following plan B: if it is impossible to remove
Python 2.7 support from packages entirely, the support for installing
Python packages for Python 2.7 will be removed.  However, there will be
exemptions granted for build-time dependencies on the Python interpreter
to keep things working, for as long as the interpreter itself is going
to stay.

The candidates for exemptions are pypy/pypy3 (CPython 2.7 is needed for
bootstrap on new platforms), Mozilla products, WebKit and WebKit-based
browsers.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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