Re: MBF for deprecating Python2 usage

[Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org>]

Diane Trout <diane@ghic.org> writes:

> On Tue, 2017-08-08 at 13:24 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> > 
> > Those people, not party [to] this conversation, have reasonable
> > expectation that such breakage will not happen without very good
> > reason.
> > Good reason would entail, as an example, that there is no better
> > alternative.
>
> Why not ask?

Ask whom? Because the issue is about the expectations of those who
*don't want* to be bothered by technical discussions like this, asking
those few who make themselves available for such questions will not
resolve the issue.

At best, we would have a collection of anecdotes and no idea how
representative they are of those who choose not to be contactable (but
still expect Debian to avoid breaking things unnecessarily).

At worst, we would have a collection of anecdotes that would be a strong
temptation for *falsely assuming* they represent the silent majority.

Barry, earlier in this thread, was correct when he pointed out that, by
the nature of the issue, we *can't* know with confidence what the
majority of people expect about this change.

So IMO the conservative assumption is that they expect Debian to provide
the stability it is famous for, and not to break the behaviour of
commands unnecessarily.

-- 
 \       “Some people have a problem, and they think “I know, I'll use |
  `\     Perl!”. Now they have some number of problems but they're not |
_o__)     sure whether it's a string or an integer.” —Benno Rice, 2011 |
Ben Finney