Re: MBF for deprecating Python2 usage

[Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org>]

On 03.08.2017 21:08, barry@debian.org wrote:
> On Aug 3, 2017, at 17:57, Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org> wrote:
>>
>> While at DebCamp, Stefano Rivera and I sat down to analyze what needs to be done
>> to deprecate Python2 usage within the distribution.  It might not be possible to
>> drop Python2 for the next release, but there are still too many issues with
>> packages.  For now we identified some categories which need fixing. These are
>> documented at https://wiki.debian.org/Sprints/2017/Python3Montreal, resulting in
>> more than 3000 bug reports.  That's a high number, on the other hand we won't
>> make much progress if the issues are not named.  My intent is to bring that up
>> in the Python BoF next week at DebConf and then filing these bug reports with
>> the user tags mentiond on the wiki page.
> 
> Great to hear that you guys talked about it.
> 
> Just a quick note that PEP 394 discussions have revived, lead by the Fedora folks.  Please do check out the new thread, especially if you have opinions about what /usr/bin/python should do once Python 2.7 is EOL.
> 
> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/linux-sig/2017-August/thread.html

I replied to this thread.  I think there should be one release which is not
shipping /usr/bin/python before /usr/bin/python should be reused and pointed at
python (>> 2). This should be good enough to get all scripts actively converted
which are not part of the distribution.  If that release is buster, we should
require the use of python2 instead of python now, document that in policy and
provide a lintian check for that.

Matthias