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by kristaps 1601 days ago
Well, anyone who still has critical stuff on Python 2, really has nobody but themselves to blame.

Bad form? Maybe. Good riddance? Yes.

1 comments

It's not really about Python itself.

Let's say I have a little utility shell script I wrote ten years ago. I basically haven't touched it ever since. Inside the script is one line of python for fetching the current time with more precision than `date`, or something, which I forgot about a long time ago.

When I install a major update, I test all my scripts to make sure they still work. I do not test after every point release, and I shouldn't have to!

You should be testing early and often and not relying on arbitrary OS version numbers (Apple disagrees with you regarding the utility) to provide some kind of api stability or assurance.

This is why docker and other hermetically sealed packaging and languages (golang) systems work by avoiding the OS implementations which must change and update as quickly as possible.

The fact anyone would rely exclusively macOS level implementations and somehow expect them to remain stable and backwards compatible for any stretch of time blows my mind.

I have a few PHP ones. I just took the opportunity to rewrite them when it was removed.

The fact it worked so well for so many years is a test that it’s needed and that it should be rewritten. All software should be kept up to date.

The same way software might have security issues and fixed, it can have other issues that need fixing.

> I do not test after every point release, and I shouldn't have to!

It's not every point release - it's just this one, and it's because this change was (very reasonably) delayed from 2020.

2.X can still be installed manually, so you have that workaround.