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by lexicality 1977 days ago
> They could have fixed most of this legacy code

They could have, but they didn't want to.

It's an open source project. Is there really much of a difference between "I'm not going to work on this system because it's terrible" and "I'm forking this system and I'm not going to support the previous version"?

In both cases you can say "well someone else will just come along and support it", and for py2 they did, for a bit. In fact I believe you can still pay if you happen to want py2 support.

But if you're not paying, you're saying "hey, this thing you work on and provide to me for free - why are you working on it in the way you want rather than the way I want??"

2 comments

> In both cases you can say "well someone else will just come along and support it", and for py2 they did, for a bit

Was python-2 handed off to new maintainers? News to me.

> why are you working on it in the way you want rather than the way I want

Is "it" python-2 or python-3?

This isn't users demanding py3 devs support py2 - it's users asking that devs who no longer want to support py2 to hand it off to those that do, rather than blocking it.

When I say "the developers of X could have done Y better" I don't mean that they owe it to me in any way to have done so.

I'm just judging their technical decision making. They are perfectly entitled to delete the whole project and start a new one and I have absolutely no right to say they shouldn't.

But I do have a right to critique their decisions from a technical standpoint.