Finding it very difficult to move pyexiv2 code from Python 2 to Python 3

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 9:20 AM Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au> wrote:
>
> On 21Aug2020 04:00, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> >Fortunately, the *next* release of Ubuntu fixes this:
> >
> >https://packages.ubuntu.com/groovy/mercurial
> >
> >It depends on Python 3.8 instead. No idea why the 20.04 release insists
> >on 2.7.
>
> I would guess they didn't have the resources to regression test the
> shift in time for 20.04. Moving to Python 3, _particularly_ with
> something like Mercurial which has a bunch of internal things which are
> in fact byte strings, risks subtle breakage.
>

I guess so, but they're packaging something that had already been
tested upstream since the *previous* minor version (at least - not
sure exactly when Py3 support came in), so I'd have thought that the
LTS Ubuntu would be the time to bring that in.

It means that Ubuntu LTS has to continue to support Python 2 from 2020
(when Python 2 exited upstream support) until 2025 or even 2030,
depending on which level of support you're looking at. In a sense,
yes, the conservative thing is to avoid making changes like that; but
ISTM that a release made in 2020 would be the correct time to make
that change.

But, I am not Canonical, I don't make these decisions.

ChrisA