Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2

Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by acdha on Monday April 20, 2020 @03:51PM (#22927746)

I think describing it as porting to a new language is misleading: on most of my projects, most of the work is a few minutes — run modernize/futurize, check the tests, etc. If the original developers were really sloppy about how they handle encoding, it can take longer but most of the problems I've seen have very little to do with Python rather than the fact that something still running Python 2 likely has significant technical debt issues — especially things like not having test coverage which make it a lot harder to ship changes.

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Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by downerending on Monday April 20, 2020 @04:39PM (#22928258)

> likely has significant technical debt issues

You're not wrong, but as a practical matter, that pretty much describes our entire industry.

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Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by acdha on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:10PM (#22928606)

Completely agreed — I would just argue that the “Python 2 vs. 3” argument is a distraction. Java hasn't had as breaking a change but there are still a ton of places running Java 6 or 7 because they like skimping on developers more than getting security updates.

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Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by Joeboy on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:03PM (#22928522)

Our product took about a year to port, from getting the go-ahead to the eventual production switch. Running modernize / futurize was like 0.01% of the work.

You're right though, we're fighting our way out of technical debt and switching to python 3 was absolutely necessary. It's forced us to sort out a lot of sketchy string / bytes handling. We do, mercifully, have ~90% test coverage.

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Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by abiogenesis on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @01:54AM (#22932391)

A year is astronomical. Does it involve writing tests that did not exist before?

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Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by Joeboy on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @03:01AM (#22932670)

I don't remember us writing any new tests specifically for the python 3 port.

One issue with the test suite was that it made heavy use of a thing called django_any that isn't supported in python 3, so decided to replace it with Factory Boy. We have about 500 django models that needed new factories. Factory Boy works quite differently and it was a lot of work to make the factories behave similarly to the old ones where possible, and update most of our ~4000 tests for the new behaviour.

So that was one issue. It was tempting to just patch django_any, but we decided to tackle the technical debt instead.

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Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by MattGaiser on Monday April 20, 2020 @06:09PM (#22929261)

> something still running Python 2 likely has significant technical debt issues

Most codebases basically.

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