duplicity-team team mailing list archive

[Aaron <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

I have been doing a bit of work to support python 3 in the codebase. 
Broadly, I have been following:
https://docs.python.org/3/howto/pyporting.html
and using Futurize: http://python-future.org/automatic_conversion.html
For any unfamiliar, that essentially means converting the code to python 
3 style and, where necessary, using import statements to pull features 
from python-future into python 2.

Before I start trying to unravel the pain that is PEP 414 (u'') vs 
futurize's unicode_literals, I wanted to know if anyone has an actual 
need for python 2.7 support in the 0.8-series. Even Ubuntu 12.04 
(Precise), which is barely still in maintenance, has python 3. We will 
also be supporting the python 2 0.7-series as the stable for a little 
while yet.

I had always planned to make duplicity support both python 2 and 3 first 
and then drop python 2 support in the future, but it seems an opportune 
time to ask whether supporting the legacy python version is necessary. 
Unlike many projects, we do not provide any libraries for others, so if 
we can get it running properly on platforms back to 2012 using python 3, 
keeping python 2 support is just going to add complexity and mess.

For context, the last python 2 release (2.7) was released in 2010 and 
originally had an EOL of 2015, though this was extended to 2020 
primarily to provide a central location for patches from third party 
vendors who offered extended support:
http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582300

Happy to be proved wrong on this if someone can think of a use case I've 
missed.

Kind regards,

Aaron