Python 2.7 released

 July 5, 2010

Two days ago, with an email to the Python Announce mailing list, Benjamin Peterson announced the release of Python 2.7.

This moment is of historical importance for the Python project since 2.7 will be the latest major 2.x release. From now on, only the Python 3.x branch will have additional development. To ease this change, Python 2.7 will get full support for five years.

The changes between 2.7 and 3 are easy to apply for the majority of codebases, but I suspect that many projects will not make the deadline. The main reason for my skepticism is that open-source projects have a horrible track record for those changes. The main reason this happens is that many libraries, used usually by many other projects, are unmaintained or so lightly maintained that such an effort will be hardly doable. Also, until the libraries get ported, there is no way the applications or other libraries that depend on them will be ported.

I hope that the Python Community will manage the porting effort and that the deadline does not need to get moved. Though, I’m pretty sure that there will be a strong pressure to move the deadline of at least a few years, potentially even 5, effectively doubling the Python 2.7 lifespan.