Re: [gentoo-dev] unsanctioned python 2.7 crusade

[William Breathitt Gray <vilhelm.gray@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2019 at 09:24:26AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 8:59 AM Jason A. Donenfeld <zx2c4@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> > It's quite another to mask random packages that have USE flags to
> > optionally support whatever python 2.7 library. If you're going to
> > last rites these, talk with the maintainer first, and only then, send
> > emails one at a time. Doing that en masse isn't appropriate.
> 
> ++ - I have no idea if that happened.  For anything USE-controlled it
> would make more sense to file a bug or mask the package-flag combo
> itself.
> 
> >
> > On another topic, I'd prefer for python 2.7 not to be removed from
> > gentoo. Tons of code still uses it.
> >
> 
> I'm sure a million people would share that preference.  I'm not sure
> what the upstream/security status is of 2.7.  Obviously to keep it
> around it would need to be reasonably secure, and somebody within
> Gentoo would have to want to maintain it.  That's basically the
> criteria for keeping anything like this around.  If somebody stepped
> up and said "I'm maintaining 2.7 and here is why it will remain
> secure..." I doubt they'd get a lot of resistance.
> 
> -- 
> Rich

If Python 2.7 is EOL upstream then it sounds like upstream will not be
maintaining it any longer; i.e. no more bug fixes nor support. That
means Gentoo would have to maintain its own Python 2.7 fork if it's to
remain in the repository. Naturally, maintaining a Python fork is not
something the Gentoo team is ready to do, so it makes sense to remove
Python 2.7 now that the EOL date is approaching.

Besides, the Python 2.7 EOL date has been known since 2015, so those
python 2-only packages will have had at least 5 years to migrate to
Python 3.

William Breathitt Gray