Placeholder Alternatives

placeholder reviews and mentions

• Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Oct 2023

  This guy wasn't maintaining Python, he as creating a new version incompatible with either Python 2.7 or Python 3.

  Red Hat and other large companies have maintained Python for years after 2.7 died (EOL date was January 1st, 2020). IBM/Red Hat offer Python 2.7 including security fixes and bug fixes until 2024 (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/4455511).

  Had he just provided patches to Python 2.7, nobody would've batted an eye. Instead, they created an alternative language that was completely different (https://web.archive.org/web/20161210161837/https://www.nafta...).

  Founders and core devs indicated that the name was the only problem (https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/issues/47#issuecomm...) and that even things like the header file names could continue to be named Python because of API compatibility.

  You can fork any open source project you like, but you still need to stick follow trademark law. You can't just release Linux 2.7 because you disagree with breaking changes in 3.0 either, but you're free to take the Linux code and release Twonux if you really care.

• Debian 12 python2 install
  1 project | /r/debian | 16 Jun 2023

  If that doesn't work for some reason, there's this project which claims to be an "active" fork of Python 2, but it also has a lot of backports and additions so I worry a bit about backward compatibility and stability: https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon You would have to build this from source as well.

• Don't carelessly rely on fixed-size unsigned integers overflow
  7 projects | /r/C_Programming | 24 Jan 2023

  Without developers of the compilers all others groups are pretty much irrelevant. There were lots of people who were telling that Python3 is abomination and some even attempted to fork it but fork haven't caught enough interest thus Python2 is, for all intends and purposes, dead.

• Blog post: Rust in 2023
  4 projects | /r/rust | 12 Dec 2022

  Python developers noticed that people are not in any hurry to switch but instead of trying to understand “why” they have drawn the line in the sand and spent their efforts trying to kill unofficial attempts to create a fork.

• Ubuntu Pro
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Oct 2022

  WinAmp 2 (1998) was widely liked. WinAmp 3 (2002) was considered bloated, and flopped.

  So Nullsoft followed it up with WinAmp 5 – because 2+3=5 – in 2003, which was very broadly the codebase of WinAmp 2 (small and lean) plus the skin support from WinAmp 3 (the only part people liked).

  This won people back, and WinAmp is still around and got an update this year, 20 years on.

  I think it's too late for there to be a Python 5, but I did read a blog post long ago – which I can't find again, or I'd link to it – which proposed a similar compromise fix to Python, in considerable technical detail.

  I am with @blagie on this: the Python world handled the 2→3 transition spectacularly badly. V3 didn't deliver enough, and strong-arming people by just end-of-lifing Python 2 and expecting the world to move on was foolhardy and short-sighted.

  (And I don't even use the language myself. I'm just observing.)

  It's a real shame Tauthon didn't get more traction and support.

  https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

  If it had got enough support and continued, maybe the Python maintainers would have learned something, but I've not seen any sign that they have.

  This is nothing new. For comparison, Perl 6 went so badly that Perl 5 now looks likely to continue as Perl 7:

  https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/

  And PHP 6 didn't really happen -- AFAICT as a total outsider, Unicode support proved too hard and it was never released; the community backported the important bits to PHP 5, and then a new PHP 7, more modest in scope, developed from PHP 5.

  The Python world could have done the same, and Tauthon was an effort in that direction.

  It's too late now. I suspect that, just as Perl has lost a massive amount of interest and use, partly from the nearly-two-decade-long effort to release Perl 5, Python has done the same -- sabotaged its own community with this high-handed "your leaders know best" approach.

• Will GIL ever be gone?
  1 project | /r/Python | 25 May 2022

  I just can't see a major fork happening (see: Tauthon, a fork of 2.7 to keep it alive, but no updates in a year or so).

• What happens if we don't migrate Python 2 code to python 3
  2 projects | /r/Python | 6 May 2021
• Pip has dropped support for Python 2
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Feb 2021

  If you want forks there are forks. Off the top of my head, Redhat is supporting Python 2 for several more years and there's a project called Tauthon [1] that is "Python 2.8" in spirit. I'm sure there's more efforts I'm not aware of.

  [1] https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

• A note from our sponsor - InfluxDB
  www.influxdata.com | 26 Apr 2024

  Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality. Learn more →