2018-03-23

1.5 Year Warning: Python2 will be End of Lifed

The end of upstream Python 2.7 support will be January 1, 2020 (2020-01-01) and the Fedora Project is working out what to do with it. As Fedora 29 would be released in 2019-11 and would get 1.5 years of support, the last release which would be considered supportable would be the upcoming release of Fedora 28. This is why the current Python maintainers are looking to orphan python2. They have made a list of the packages that would be affected by this and have started a discussion on the Fedora development lists, but people who only see notes of this from blogs or LWN posts may not have seen it yet. 

Here is my current status on things:
  1. The epylog package will most likely be dead.package in rawhide. The package would need a complete rewrite to work with Python3 and it has not been touched by upstream, nor do I have time to do the port.
  2. I don't own the nagios-plugins-fts or nagios-plugins-lgcdm but if they ended up on my plate I would do the same thing.
  3. python2 is still supported in RHEL-7 and will be until 2024. epylog and any python scripts inside of nagios packages I own will be supported in EL7.
If your project currently requires python2, you need to either help your upstream move to python3, find a company or service that will maintain python2.7 for future years, or be prepared to spend years in the wilderness. From the many years and projects I supported Fortran IV, perl4, Java 1.2, and ADA83 code in the early 2000's... I expect that this will be where many people are going to be. [I will try to cover how to handle that in a future blog.]

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