Re: Python 2 retirement — what should Guix do?

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:

> 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.

I expect Python 2 to be widely used for a few years longer. In my
environment (computational chemistry), there is still a lot of Python 2
code in use that is too expensive to port to Python 3 (mainly because of
C modules). Most people seem to expect that life will go on like before,
not worrying about the end of support for Python 2 at all. The few who
do are making plans for running their Python 2 code in sandboxed
environments.

Guix is one of the best tools to manage this legacy code, so I hope
Python 2 will stay in for those packages that need it. But the general
policy of having both for all packages can certainly be softened without
much loss.

Konrad.