Re:Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros
by allen_lasn on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @08:45AM
(#29240463)
Python 2 was supported for 20 years. Python 2.7 (largely compatible with other Python 2 versions - and including backported changes from Python 3.1 - was supported for 12 years).
The Python project went absolutely above and beyond to support users who wanted to drag out making not particularly complex changes to their codebase for over a decade.
During this same time they improved Python 3 in response to feedback and among other effects, made it less different and easier to port, from Python 2.
Many common packages supported 2.7 up to its end-of-life as well.
One of the reasons that Python is often a source of compatibility errors is that both distros and large standalone applications embraced Python in the early 2000s, became dependent on a particular version, and then refused to work with newer versions.
Python is not responsible for all the engineering decisions everyone writing in the language has ever made.
Re:Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros
by roenxi on Wednesday November 17, 2021 @02:26AM
(#29250088)
Yes. That is what a culture of not supporting backwards compatibility looks like. If they valued backwards compatibility they wouldn't have to support multiple versions of Python over long stretches of time. They would be supporting 1 version that was backwards compatible with code written over 20 years ago.
Re:Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros
by mangecoeur on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @08:25AM
(#29240256)
It really does have to do with the number of maintainers. A huge part of the work is not just building a package manager, but coordinating many stakeholders to all use it. That would also mean building a package manager that covers all of those use cases from day one - what's the point of trying to make people use something that doesn't meet their needs. These things are a huge amount of work. Unsurprisingly, other widely used languages have the same situation - dozens of build and packaging systems for C/C++, Java, Javascript...
If I can make an observation - it has nothing to do with the number of maintainers. The problem is deep, cultural and occupies a difficult space where it might be a bug or a feature.
The root cause here is that the Python project, and surrounding community, have little real respect for backwards compatibility. The complexity of Python setups is driven by the need to run multiple - potentially even mutually incompatible in the case of 2.x v. 3.x - versions of Python.
All languages have packaging problems, but Python is unique in my experience in the sheer number of Python installs that I need to manage simultaneously. I still have C code that works from around the time that I learned C. I'd need another Python environment installed to say the same thing about Python.