Conill: The long-term consequences of maintainers’ actions [LWN.net]

Conill: The long-term consequences of maintainers’ actions

Posted Sep 19, 2021 22:16 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (subscriber, #34940)
In reply to: Conill: The long-term consequences of maintainers’ actions by mathstuf
Parent article: Conill: The long-term consequences of maintainers’ actions

Also useful if both the older & newer API are supported for a while, and preferably the newer API has all the features the older one has, so that people actually get some time to port things within a reasonable time…

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Conill: The long-term consequences of maintainers’ actions

Posted Sep 20, 2021 5:27 UTC (Mon) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (3 responses)

You say that, and yet even after maintaining Python 2 and 3 in parallel - for more than a decade! - with 6 years notice of end of life for 2, the team got entitled shrieking and abuse when they finally shut down 2.

Conill: The long-term consequences of maintainers’ actions

Posted Sep 20, 2021 8:09 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Which was especially egregious, since all the team did was say that they would not release new versions of Python 2, nor would they look to see if Python 3 bugfixes applied to Python 2.

And there are things like Tauthon out there that someone who really wanted to stick to Py2 could use and help support; the complaining was largely because PSF Python would no longer support Python 2.

Conill: The long-term consequences of maintainers’ actions

Posted Sep 23, 2021 1:42 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (subscriber, #34940) [Link] (1 responses)

I’m obviously not talking about dropping support for a past API after 10 years. But there are some that do that every single-digit number of weeks/months…

Conill: The long-term consequences of maintainers’ actions

Posted Sep 23, 2021 8:48 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

I think the point is that *no* amount of notice will be universally acceptable. There's always somebody who's still using your ancient software (or hardware) that you told them to stop using years ago, because there's always some sector of the economy that doesn't monetarily benefit from upgrading just yet.

For example:

* Significant portions of the US financial system are or were recently running on EBCDIC-based systems, because that's the reason IBM gave for opposing the removal of trigraphs in C++17.
* In 2019, the US Air Force announced that they had figured out how to launch a nuclear missile without the use of floppy disks. 8-inch floppies, to be precise.
* Every single time Python is mentioned in any capacity in an LWN article, there's always a huge flame war in the comments over how terrible the 2-to-3 migration was, regardless of whether this actually has anything whatsoever to do with the contents of the article.