[users at bb.net] Should we remove support for python 2.7?

[Craig Rodrigues]

As someone who did a large portion of porting buildbot to Python 3,
I'm glad to see the discussion of dropping Python 2.7 coming up.

Python 3 has matured, and the Python world seems to be jumping onboard
Python 3,
including many third party packages.

The buildbot developer community is small, and maintaining functioning code
on Python 2 and 3 is more and more of a burden.

What I would suggest is the following.

1.  Pick a date/release where Python 2 support in buildbot will be dropped,
at least
     6-8 months from now.  For example, whatever release happens in June
2019.
2.  From now until that date, put in the release notes and medium blog post
that
     Python 2 support will be dropped in June 2019.  This will at least
give buildbot
     users a decent warning.
3.  Add a banner warning to the top of the https://buildbot.net web page
that Python 2 support will be
     dropped by June 2019.
4.  In June 2019, put logic in setup.py to fail if installed on Python 2.

No matter what date you choose, there will be some buildbot users who will
be stuck
on older versions of Buildbot and Python 2.  There are still plenty of
buildbot 8 installations out there for example.
But giving people some warning is a reasonable thing to do, to raise
awareness.

It's tricky, but we need to balance the needs of users, versus the small
development team on buildbot
and the ability of developers to maintain working multiple versions of
Python.

--
Craig


On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 6:46 AM Pierre Tardy <tardyp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> With new fresh contributors coming with lots of new ideas and energy, we
> are thinking about dropping the support for python 2.
> This would allow to embrace newer features, and simplify the code by
> removing compat code.
>
> On the other end, we also have other people asking to slow down the
> monthly release pace (cause it is hard to keep up)
>
> One solution would be to release a 1.7.0 LTS version, and only integrate
> bug fixes there.
>
> Please have a look on the discussion on our issue tracker:
> https://github.com/buildbot/buildbot/issues/4439
>
> Regards
> Pierre
>
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