[burntsushi]

I just looked at that list and I see several prominent projects that (according to that list) don't support Python 3: MySQL-python, gevent, Twisted, eventlet, oauth2, thrift, nltk, mechanize, etc. I've used more than a few of these libraries over the years.

I mean, yeah, the list is getting smaller. That's understood. But that doesn't render the problem of depending on only-Python 2 libraries moot.

I think the fundamental insight of the OP is that Python X (the purgatory corresponding to code compatible with both Python 2 and 3) is an absolute pain to write. There's plenty you can do to make Python X easier (like the `six` library or ignoring Python 3.{0,1,2}), but the programmer is still left with the burden of writing code compatible with both versions.

There's just no denying that the Python 3 transition is a huge fucking pain that is costing people tons of time and money. With that in mind, it is absolutely reasonable that people are resisting the change.

[illumen]

Twisted is mostly ported, and you can install via pip and pypi. Some of the more ancient parts remain to be finished however.

gevent is ported, but not in an official release.

There is a mysql alternative module.

mechanize is ported, but not in official branch

nltk alpha3 for python 3 is available

There are python3 thrift ports, but the maintainers are slow.

[burntsushi]

Yes, I knew most of that. But the fact remains that they aren't complete yet and therefore can't actually be relied on as a dependency.

(N.B. I seem to recall someone telling me that gevent had been ported over a year ago and that all that remained was to just make a release. So count me skeptical until the port is complete.)

And that's just the most popular projects. Imagine what it looks like with the less popular projects? It isn't pretty. This is what the OP was talking about with the "tail" of Python projects.

N.B. I don't personally have this problem with less popular projects. I've always done my best to avoid depending on unmaintained or inactive projects because they tend to rot as time goes on (irrespective of massive changes like Python 2 and 3). But plenty of other people have this problem and it's definitely not an unreasonable problem to have.