Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

[Devin Jeanpierre]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 6:34 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 7/18/2015 8:27 PM, Mark Lawrence wrote:
>> On 19/07/2015 00:36, Terry Reedy wrote:
>> Programmers don't much like doing maintainance work when they're paid to
>> do it, so why would they volunteer to do it?
>
> Right.  So I am asking: if a 3.x user volunteers a 3.x patch and a 3.x core
> developer reviews and edits the patch until it is ready to commit, why
> should either of them volunteer to do a 2.7 backport that they will not use?

Because it helps even more people. The reason people make upstream
contributions is so that the world benefits. If you only wanted to
help yourself, you'd just patch CPython locally, and not bother
contributing anything upstream.

> I am suggesting that if there are 10x as many 2.7only programmers as 3.xonly
> programmers, and none of the 2.7 programmers is willing to do the backport
> *of an already accepted patch*, then maybe it should not be done at all.

That just isn't true. I have backported 3.x patches. Other people have
backported entire modules.

It gets really boring submitting 2.7-specific patches, though, when
they aren't accepted, and the committers have such a hostile attitude
towards it. I was told by core devs that, instead of fixing bugs in
Python 2, I should just rewrite my app in Python 3. It has even been
implied that bugs in Python 2 are *good*, because that might help with
Python 3 adoption.

>> Then even if you do the
>> work to fix *ANY* bug there is no guarantee that it gets committed.
>
> I am discussing the situation where there *is* a near guarantee (if the
> backport works and does not break anything and has not been so heavily
> revised as to require a separate review).

That is not how I have experienced contribution to CPython. No, the
patches are *not* guaranteed, and in my experience they are not likely
to be accepted.

If the issue was closed as fixed before I contributed the backported
patch, does anyone even see it?

-- Devin