Python 2 retirement — what should Guix do?

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

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In 2020, Python 2 will no longer be supported by the Python team. [0]

To quote Guido van Rossum, "The way I see the situation for 2.7 is that
EOL is January 1st, 2020, and there will be no updates, not even
source-only security patches, after that date. Support (from the core
devs, the PSF, and python.org) stops completely on that date." [1]

In Guix we aim to offer software that is safe to use, which typically
means "maintained".

Presumably, Python 2 will be maintained by some third parties for quite
a while after 2020.

I wonder, what should Guix do?

Personally, I think our set of Python packages is relatively hard to
maintain. There is a lot of brittle code in there. I'd be happy to drop
our policy that Python libraries have both Python 2 and 3 packages by
default.

[0]
https://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/

[1]
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2018-March/152348.html

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