With Python 2 EOL'ed, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Moves Along With Its Python 2 Removal

With Python 2 having reached end-of-life at the start of 2020, Ubuntu and Debian developers continue their work on removing Python 2 at least from the base OS. Work continues on transitioning packages to Python 3 or otherwise ultimately dropping unmaintained packages.

Matthias Klose who has been coordinating much of the Python 2 removal effort for Ubuntu and Debian has provided another update on the matter. libpython-dev, python, python-minimal and other packages are no longer provided as part of the python-defaults package as of today in the Ubuntu 20.04 archive.

Those packages are no longer shipped in the Ubuntu "Focal" archive although python2-minimal and other python2* packages are for satisfying the dependencies of remaining packages that are not yet Python 3 compliant. A new python-pointing-to-python2 package pointing python to Python 2 is expected to come in the Focal repository. More information within Ubuntu-devel.

Ultimately the goal is to have Python 2 out of the main archive in time for the Ubuntu 20.04 release in April considering it's a Long-Term Support release that Canonical needs to maintain for years to come, but within the universe archive is likely to still be some Python 2 remnants for packages not seeing Python 3 support.