Re: Merging the purge-python2-packages branch

[Maxime Devos]

zimoun schreef op wo 01-06-2022 om 21:51 [+0200]:
> Any user of Guix, scientist or not, can be surprised that their
> perfectly working packages are suddenly removed without a period of
> grace.  Yes, these packages could have been removed before today since
> they are EOL since 2 years.  It does not change my concern.
> 
> What is the emergency in the maintenance burden that we cannot publicly
> announce the purge and wait a grace* period?  For the broken packages, I
> understand.  I am sorry but I am still missing for the perfectly working
> packages.
> [...]
> *grace period: it could have been short as couple of weeks.

The grace period has been started back in 2008 and ended in 2015.
I don't know the original location where this has been publicly
announced, but there is [0]:

> (from [0])
> Sunsetting Python 2
> [...]
> We did not want to hurt the people using Python 2. So, in 2008, we
> announced that we would sunset Python 2 in 2015,

This is a 5 year grace period, which is already a lot of weeks.
Futhermore, this has even been extended for five additional years:

> (from [0])
> and asked people to upgrade before then. Some did, but many did not.
> So, in 2014, we extended that sunset till 2020

So we're at a ten-year grace period.  And some distros have informally
extended the grace period a bit longer to some limited degree.

That said, I suppose it would have been better to also repeat the
message about the grace period on the blog, channel news and info-guix
(and maybe on IRC too, why not) as you seem to suggest, for people that
follow distro news but not upstream news, given the large impact (many
python2 packages)?

[0]: https://www.python.org/doc/sunset-python-2/

Greetings,
Maxime.

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