RE: [PATCH 0/6] Transition git-p4.py to support Python 3 only

On December 10, 2021 4:34 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On Thu, Dec 09 2021, Joel Holdsworth wrote:

quoted

Python 2 was discontinued in 2020, and there is no longer any
officially supported interpreter. Further development of git-p4.py
will require would-be developers to test their changes with all
supported dialects of the language. However, if there is no longer
any supported runtime environment available, this places an
unreasonable burden on the Git project to maintain support for an

obselete dialect of the language.

quoted

Does it? I can still install Python 2.7 on Debian, presumably other
OS's have similar ways to easily test it.

Yes, that is a good point to make against "we cannot maintain the half meant
to cater to Python2 of the script".  Developers should be able to keep and
test Python2 support, if it is necessary.

So the more important question is if there are end-users that have no choice
but sticking to Python2.  Is there distributions and systems that do not offer
Python3, on which end-users have happily been using Python2?  If some
users with vendor supported Python2 do not have access to Python3, cutting
them off may be premature.

As the general direction, I do not mind deprecating support for Python2, and
then eventually removing it.  I just do not know if 2 years is long enough for
the latter (IIRC, the sunset happened at the beginning of 2020, and we are
about to end 2021).

The HPE NonStop Itanium platform only provides Python 2.7. That is the last version that will be available on that platform until it goes off support some time in the next few years (there are known very large US companies who are git users on that platform but I cannot share their names here). The NonStop x86 platform is currently on Python 3.6.8 but I have to take action to select the python3 object - not a big deal. Since I am continually running the git test suite with each release, the python 2 code can continue to be tested. Python 2 is also available on our x86 machine for backward compatibility reasons - it may vanish at some point but that isn’t scheduled yet.

-Randall