As some of you may or may not know, Python is a programming language that was started way back in the 1990s by Guido van Rossum (who recently stepped down as Benevolent Dictator For Life due to some other drama, which I won't get into). I'll quote from Wikipedia for some history here:
Python 2.0, released 2000, introduced features like list comprehensions and a garbage collection system capable of collecting reference cycles. Python 3.0, released 2008, was a major revision of the language that is not completely backward-compatible, and much Python 2 code does not run unmodified on Python 3. Due to concern about the amount of code written for Python 2, support for Python 2.7 (the last release in the 2.x series) was extended to 2020.
The original sunset date was 2015, but so many people were still using Python 2 that in 2014, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) extended the sunset to 2020 (more info on that here).
While lots of people were initially upset about this sunset, including some extremely vocal members of the community (Zed Shaw is notorious for his "hot takes", he once wrote an article called "Rails (a web framework) is a Ghetto"), most people have now converted their code over and can enjoy a whole host of new features, faster execution, and better support. This includes Dropbox, who had to convert somewhere on the order of 1 million lines of code in their python 2 codebase.
Sorry, I'm rambling. All of this is a precursor to some interesting discussion I found on the Debian (a Linux version) package distribution mailing list. One of the primary maintainers wrote a strongly worded response to pulling out packages from Debian that still depended on Python 2. In this specific case, the package in question is called Calibre. It's a cross-platform ebook manager.
Digging a bit more into this discussion, the author of Calibre commented on a bug report for his project saying that the project needed to move to python 3 with:
No, it doesn't. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself.
Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase.
status wontfix
So the maintainer of this e-book software has essentially said that he'll personally take over maintaining python 2 (which involves identifying, patching, and distributing any and all security fixes, as well as compiling and distributing versions of the actual codebase yourself). Note that currently, this work is done by roughly 80 people. And he'll do this because it's easier than converting his codebase. I wish I had that level of self-confidence.
