Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Continuing To Work On Python 2 Removal

[Tomin]

It also shows some on that list on my laptop, but I safely removed them now and everything is still running fine and stable: no other software was depended on it.

Sure that can happen too. On Arch Linux it's pretty easy since pacman -R doesn't remove dependencies unless explicitly told to.

[Tomin]

I'm just a student but why is end of life for a language a bad thing? People still code in C99 and Fortran and Cobol. Just because the language is old doesn't mean you can't write software for that standard right? Its not like say WIndows XP where security vulnerabilities exist that don't get patched anymore. It is just a programing language. What am I missing?

CPython also includes a vast standard library that doesn't receive updates anymore next year so that may have unpatched vulnerabilities. Other implementations of Python 2 language and library may still receive updates.

[AsuMagic]

You do realize that almost all of those libraries have had Python 3 ports for a long time now? So no need to keep the Python 2 ones around unless you use them for coding still.

Most of these have hard dependencies against other packages.

[AsuMagic]

I have to assume those were pulled in for building some AUR packages or via some IDE with cruddy version control dependencies. Those are the only reasons those ever get installed on my systems.

AsuMagic The package pahole-git should be rebuilt. It depends on python3 now (and has since at least May according to the AUR page).

How long do you go without rebuilding git based AUR packages? Over six months isn't good practice to get into.

I just kind of forgot about it. I have not used it in a long time.

[Vistaus]

Most of these have hard dependencies against other packages.

Not on my system. I successfully removed them without breaking anything.

[Pajn]

The next version of inkscape is already ported to Python3. It is available on debian experimental (beta version).

So you'll probably be fine.

https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-...b51c23992627db

Nice. I assume that will be included in 20.04 then so I'll just await that and have everything solved for me

[starshipeleven]

The P2 to P3 debacle echoes the even bigger disaster that it is IPv4 to IPv6, I mention it because the IPv6 chaps deliberately sabotaged all efforts to make it backwards compatible, "It's just better".

How do you make a system that can give unique addresses to orders of magnitude more devices than the older one retrocompatible without active address translation system (i.e. basically a NAT) or other similar shenanigans somewhere in the stack anyway. Do you even know how networking works?

IPv4 retrocompatibility is NAT on a router that has also a IPv6 DHCP server for IPv6 devices.

[starshipeleven]

I'm just a student but why is end of life for a language a bad thing? People still code in C99 and Fortran and Cobol. Just because the language is old doesn't mean you can't write software for that standard right? Its not like say WIndows XP where security vulnerabilities exist that don't get patched anymore. It is just a programing language. What am I missing?

Python is a very high-level (abstracted) language and therefore relies on a pretty big standard library of high abstraction functions. This means that once this library stops being supported you have a big chunk of unmaintained code at the core of your project.

A rough equivalent for C would be Glibc or musl or whatever other standard C library you will most likely be using if you are doing something more complex than a single "hello world". For Java it would be the core libraries shipped with the runtime, and so on and so forth.

If all you care is "does it run" then it isn't a major issue, it will be a long while before something does not run anymore, but it is a security problem, just as with Win XP.

[starshipeleven]

inkscape and solaar is the only thing I use that need python2. Solaar is easy to just ignore but inkscape is worse. Is there any other reasonably good vector software to replace it?

Solaar is using Python 3 on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. The upstream repo is working fine on Python 3.7 since last year https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar...5bfbc5666b4756

So overall everything is fine for you.

[Isedonde]

BleachBit has already been ported to Python 3 and Gtk 3. So nice try.

I'm sorry, but that's not correct. It has been ported to Gtk 3 a few weeks ago, that much is true, but it still lacks python 3 support. Thankfully, it is planned for "pretty soon": https://github.com/bleachbit/bleachbit/issues/163

As that issue tracker clearly demonstrates, it is not as easy as one might think ("just use py2to3").