Hello,
I would like to talk about what has been discussed at the last developer conference call this week: Dropping Python 2
This version of Python has reached its end of life and will no longer receive any security fixes. Hence we need to get rid of it as soon as possible.
However, there is lots of software that still depends on it which has to be migrated away first.
There are at least the following packages:
boost fetchmail fireinfo iotop ipaddr libxml2 libxslt newt nmap python python-clientform python-daemon python-distutils python-distutils-extra python-docutils python-feedparser python-inotify python-ipaddress python-m2crypto python-mechanize python-optional-src python-pyparsing python-rssdler python-setuptools python-six python-typing
We also have the following scripts:
config/ca-certificates/certdata2pem.py config/unbound/unbound-dhcp-leases-bridge
Fireinfo is written by us and has a lot of C which will make it a little bit more difficult to migrate. We would also have to be very careful to not change any behaviour of the current implementation.
The rest is probably either software that is entirely written in Python 2 or software that brings bindings for Python. The latter case is easy because we can either force it to build with Python 3 or we just disable the bindings.
Ultimately we might need to keep Python around in the build system if there are other packages that rely on it. However, it would be great if we were able to remove it from the distribution very soon. Looking at his list, it does not seem to be too difficult.
Would anyone be up to help and remove Python from any of those packages above? I would like to aim for Core Update 158 and remove as much stuff as possible - if we can everything - and then remove Python 2 in the update after that. If anyone has any custom scripts or applications, people will have some time to migrate away.
Best, -Michael