Re: Python 2 retirement — what should Guix do?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Leo,

> Presumably, Python 2 will be maintained by some third parties for quite
> a while after 2020.

If that is so, it’s probably fine to keep a “python2” package.

> Personally, I think our set of Python packages is relatively hard to
> maintain. There is a lot of brittle code in there. I'd be happy to drop
> our policy that Python libraries have both Python 2 and 3 packages by
> default.

I agree.  My preference is to build Python 2 packages only when
absolutely needed by another package.

It’s possible that this will be a non-negligible number of packages
(some bioinfo tools developed in 2018 come to mind…), but I don’t want
us to artificially extend the lifespan of an unmaintained language.

--
Ricardo