[nikolay]

Well, 2to3 works surprisingly well and I've converted tons of projects with it. Most major Python projects support both 2 and 3, so, private codebases, which "just work", should stay on the "just working" old versions of the interpreter instead of insisting maintainers to waste time entertaining their laziness, because things that "just work" don't require ANY updates, right?

[josefx]

I am happy as long as I can plug-in old versions of the interpreter in a system 10 years from now as easily as I could plug-in my VHS recorder into the TV. Might be able to do that if I install a windows version of python on Wine, there is a good chance (~100%) that the dependencies of python on Linux will not remain compatible that long.

[nikolay]

Yeah, but dependencies are another story. So, my point is, if something "just works" and you don't want to have to upgrade, you need to freeze the entire system with all dependencies, which includes hardware, OS, etc. Everything else is just an illusion.

I sill have people using my Win16-based software written using Borland Pascal with Objects I wrote 30 years ago. They keep changing power supplies, etc. of an old system, but recently they had some major hardware problem and asked me to help them. I couldn't and wouldn't.

They ended up somebody creating a VM from their hard drive, and they are happy now and can back up that image and keep the circus going on forever.