Red Hat Confirms RHEL 8 Will Drop Python 2

[TingPing]

Isnt migrating from Python 2 to 3 really straightfoward, unlike some other transitions?

In a large complex codebase it can be tricky, usually around string encodings. The process has been done a million times and there are plenty of tools and docs over it though so its certainly doable.

[nanonyme]

Isnt migrating from Python 2 to 3 really straightfoward, unlike some other transitions?

Depends on code and how old it is. The older code you have that hasn't been refactored to newer Python 2 features, the closer to impossible it will be to get the codebase to run on Python 3 without full rewrite

[nanonyme]

My 1st reaction was "that will piss off a lot of my team mates" ... ie lots of python2 code ( dev/ops ) will need to be fixed. But then I remembered ... we still have CentOS 6 boxes around, and no real plan to upgrade them.

Your first reaction was likely also incorrect. I doubt they remove Python 2 from RHEL 8, just make sure they fix system components to work with Python 3 so they can ship with no Python 2 installed

[Tomin]

Isnt migrating from Python 2 to 3 really straightfoward, unlike some other transitions?

When writing new code it's usually fairly simple to make it Python 2.7 and 3 compatible. I've done that a lot. Porting old code may be easy but only if it's free of str handling bugs which it rarely is.

One of the reasons (or the main reason?) we have Python 3 is to move to Unicode by default. You can actually discover a lot of str encoding bugs by making your code Python 3 compatible. Well at least if the code is of decent size and doesn't manage to somehow avoid str/bytes objects.

[kpedersen]

My 1st reaction was "that will piss off a lot of my team mates" ... ie lots of python2 code ( dev/ops ) will need to be fixed. But then I remembered ... we still have CentOS 6 boxes around, and no real plan to upgrade them.

In the small chance that they do upgrade to CentOS 8, then I am sure a:

# yum install python2

will be all that is needed .
Worst case scenario will be that you have to add the EPEL or RPMFusion repos for it to work.

[uid313]

Some offenders are GIMP which still rely on old Python 2.

[wswartzendruber]

Michael, i dunno where you get the idea that RHEL8 wil;l use Wayland as Default? when its not evewn complete an is still missing a lot of functionality

What's it missing? It seems pretty complete in Fedora 27.

[nanonyme]

What's it missing? It seems pretty complete in Fedora 27.

Mostly things which haven't been accepted to belong to Wayland (screen capture for teleconferencing, colour profiles for professional image processing)

[kgonzales]

My 1st reaction was "that will piss off a lot of my team mates" ... ie lots of python2 code ( dev/ops ) will need to be fixed. But then I remembered ... we still have CentOS 6 boxes around, and no real plan to upgrade them.

When you use CentOS, you get what you pay for.

[mulenmar]

Yes I come here to bitch, like the majority of you do. Isn't that what the Phoronix forum is for?

Actually, it's for the more general case of "Trolling", spiced with pedantry and corrections of Michael's exhaustion-induced typos. Occasionally some actual signal from developers rises above the noise.