The community will fork the 2.7 codebase and continue to support it, even if Python.org EOLs it.

It looks like all Python 2.8 is missing is a new name:

https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/

I can see "the community" doing security fixes, maybe some bug fixing and a few back ports, but so far I havn't seen much effort from any community to bring active development of new features.

It seems like the 2.7 community is happy enough without the new features -- just need the bugfixes and continued backwards compatibility to keep that segment happy.

From a new features perspective, the other reply's Placeholder is fascinating. (I haven't looked into it thoroughly yet.)

It is certainly interesting if it truly materializes. But it looks like the plan is to mostly backport stuff from py3- so py3 is still the future, with Placeholder getting some of those features eventually. And that is great from a legacy codebase perspective.

Right.

That means nothing. Python 3 was also expected to be mainstream by 2015, but it's nowhere near even 30% yet.

It's mainstream for new projects. Which is what was expected and aimed for.

Citation needed. Most companies I know that have 2.7 older projects also do new projects in 2.7. They don't want to introduce 2 different versions of the language, set of dependencies etc to their production.

absolutely true. imagine porting a decade or more of code for only the promised benefit of a more "pure" language. asyncio is nice, but excluding it and enhanced generator syntax from 2.7+ is >policy<, not engineering. python 3 is bootheel style top-down engineering >management<, not good engineering. The BFDL is fallible. Placeholder looks like a great Python 2.8+ to me. Runs all my old code and gives me new syntax, without rejiggering the stdlib for purity's sake? Twist my arm.