Re: Python 2 end-of-life?

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi Bengt,

On Fri, 29 Nov 2019 at 07:54, Bengt Richter <bokr@bokr.com> wrote:

> > For example, considering rust, it is about the bootstrappability. See [1].
> >
> > [1] http://guix.gnu.org/blog/2018/bootstrapping-rust/
> >
>
> That looks horrible to me :)
> Don't they have a "guild disasseble" kind of thing that they could use
> to recover a mungeable source of the final product, and then
> make a self-hoster from that (even if it takes serious hacking)?

Do you have better to propose to bootstrap Rust? Does it work?



> > > It would be really interesting if you could tweak your py2-dependent-package
> > > lister to show for each how many lines of py2 code are causing the py2 dependency!
> >
> > It is really hard -- nor impossible. And I am not convinced that the
> > tough work will pay off.
>
> Why so hard? Is not all the information available in sources?

Again, go ahead if you evaluate that it deserves it.
My humble point of view is: it is an hard task and the work will not pay off.

It will not pay off because it is fully unclear what to do with this
information about "how many lines of py2".


My approach is: try to build and/or run with Python 3. If yes, cool!
update the package and remove from the list [1], else inspect why and
try to fix (patch) and report this patch upstream.

[1] http://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/38420


> > To me, one path to remove unnecessary dependencies of Python2 is to
> > give a look package by package, try to replace the Python2 dependency
> > by the Python3 (if exist) and see what happens. If it does not build
> > because the package really uses Python2 features, figure out which
> > one, patch with the Python3 equivalent and submit the patch upstream.
>
> That will likely be the best thing to do for a number of packages,
> but I would rather plug in a guix/guile/bash equivalent that passes
> the same well-designed (! :) test suite, where that is possible.

What is the goal of such? What do we win? Larger than python 2 -> python 3.


All the best,
simon