RE: [PATCH 0/6] Transition git-p4.py to support Python 3 only

From: Joel Holdsworth <jholdsworth@nvidia.com>
Date: Dec 13, 2021, 19:58 UTC
Message-ID: <BN8PR12MB336129AD5C148267925FB387C8749@BN8PR12MB3361.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqv8zsb8xc.fsf@gitster.g>

> Sure, but that defeats the whole notion of "python3 is everywhere,
> python2 is dead, and nobody should be using the 2-year dead version".
> "test_have_prereq PYTHON" should be sufficient in such a world, no?

That's a bit of a stretch.

As Elijah said:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Python2 was deprecated by the python project in 2008, with announced
> plans to stop all support (including security fixes) in 2015.  They pushed the
> sunset date back to Jan 1, 2020.  So it has only been end-of-life for just under
> 2 years, but it's been deprecated for over
> 13 years.

Python 3 *is* everywhere. During the transitionary period, Debian allowed python2 and python3 to coexist on a system by giving them the names /usr/bin/python and /usr/bin/python3 respectively, because they are effectively different languages. This allowed legacy code to continue to function in view that it would eventually get ported over to python 3, opting into it by changing the shebang to point at /usr/bin/python3

"test_have_prereq PYTHON" lumps all python versions together as if they were one thing, which they are not. It's as meaningful as lumping together all the Perl versions, or lumping C++98 together with modern C++. If a system has Python 1 installed, strictly speaking the configuration script should indicate that Python is present! - but there's a bit more

I am quite sure the Python 2 will linger on in some form or other - maybe forever, but that doesn't mean the Git project should be developing, maintaining, testing or releasing Python 2 code in 2021.

Python 3 is so well established, that even the minimum version requirement I want to bump to: Python 3.6, is end-of-life.

Joel