[Twisted-Python] A Proposal for reducing the burden of developing on Twisted by dropping Python 2 support

[Donal McMullan]

Hi Amber -

Notwithstanding the fact that VFX/Anim will be stuck on PY2 for a few more
years, this all sounds very reasonable. None of the proposed timelines
would cause problems for my team.

Many thanks

DJM

On Mon, 25 Mar 2019 at 10:15, Amber Brown <hawkowl at atleastfornow.net> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Since the Python 2 EOL date is rapidly approaching, I thought it was
> time we consider dropping Python 2 support.
>
> I personally find that Python 2 compat adds a huge amount of overhead
> when working on and maintaining Twisted, and think that with the current
> maintainer availability, dropping it sooner rather than later would have
> a beneficial effect on how much work we spend on shims/compat,
> complexity, and our ability to ship new features, as well as onboarding
> people who are interested in the project, but have no interest (or
> experience!) in Python 2.7.
>
> It is basically summed up by doing a feature freeze on an agreed-upon
> version of Twisted, that will be the last version released for 2.7. It
> would be abnormal in that it would get security fixes (our current
> policy is to only release them for current versions) and critical
> bugfixes, but would otherwise be frozen.
>
> One of my rationales is that from some analysis of PyPI download
> statistics, the vast majority of Python 2 users are using old versions
> of Twisted, while nearly all our Python 3 users are on the latest
> version. As such, I believe freezing a version that will get security
> updates but no new features would not be a massive loss to those stuck
> on Python 2 for whatever reason.
>
> Twisted's compatibility policy would still apply, ensuring that Python
> 2/3 compatible software using Twisted would be able to use the older
> Twisted version on Python 2, and the newer version on Python 3, as you
> would usually expect.
>
> You can find the proposal here, in this handy-dandy Google Doc:
>
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S4CGgZC09blLIdk3Zo7wBa75A9_JuuH_3akkyjN0lik/edit
>
> Comments are welcome, as well as which timeline seems reasonable.
>
> - Amber
>
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