> As someone who has 6 comments in this thread yourself, I don't think you are in position to complaint.
This isn't a numbers contest. Unlike yours, none of my comments are shitting on the efforts of volunteers that are doing their best to keep people like you happy and making money using a project you're not paying for.
> So maybe you want to recheck with reality whether the transition was a success instead of arguing with me?
Why is "demand" in scare-quotes? I never said that, and it's a loaded term.
The issue here is suggesting you shouldn't freely criticise flaws in FOSS software. This is harmful, and goes directly to affecting information people have available to them in choosing whether or not to use a piece of software in the first place.
Do you actually know what money/time OP might be spending, losing, or making on Django?
> FOSS gives you freedom to do these things on your own. Money gets you other people doing it for you.
What a cop out. A lack of being paid (money at least) doesn't imply no obligations, nor freedom from criticism.
> Why is "demand" in scare-quotes? I never said that, and it's a loaded term.
Because I was referring to coldtea's demands.
> What a cop out. A lack of being paid (money at least) doesn't imply no obligations, nor freedom from criticism.
Excellent, then you should be fine with me criticizing the attitude that's been displayed here.
> The issue here is suggesting you shouldn't freely criticise flaws in FOSS software. This is harmful, and goes directly to affecting information people have available to them in choosing whether or not to use a piece of software ion the first place.
Why is this the conclusion you draw from my posts? I said it before, the Python 3 transition sucked. It's something we kind of all agree on. There is plenty of criticism to be made.
However, I really want to recontextualize this: Django is an open source project, maintained by a non-profit. Python is an open source project, maintained by a non-profit. The projects in question, with "tens of millions of lines of Python 2 code" (only a tiny amount of which would need to be ported, but I disgress...), are most often for-profit projects. Yeah, it's a bit rich.
This is the same as the IE6 situation: Want support for it? Pay extra for it! You should not expect free support for technology for which the EOL was announced years in advance just because you're using a lot of it. And you will have no issue finding paid support. Heck tell you what, if you do, shoot me an email, I do contract work sometimes.
You know why FOSS is great? It's great because the PSF/DSF do not get to revoke your license to use the software they're no longer supporting. You get to use it forever. This is your freedom and it's a good one. Make use of it!
>> A lack of being paid (money at least) doesn't imply no obligations, nor freedom from criticism.
> Excellent, then you should be fine with me criticizing the attitude that's been displayed here.
Great. Do you actually have a response to this point in context, then?
> This is the same as the IE6 situation: Want support for it? Pay extra for it!
You did not argue this. You said "shit on", which doesn't translate to "demanding support". you are deflecting from the one thing I actually criticised.
Your strawman is "support is being demanded" - this isn't the case. Any further arguments on that topic are just beating the strawman.
Furthermore, oficially changing the direction of Django also may affect contributions, changes to the roadmap or architectural design for example.
You're appropriating criticism that was not directed to you, but to coldtea. Here and elsewhere.
Edit: Yes, appropriating. You're taking criticism I specifically directed at coldtea, applying them to your comments and then complaining it doesn't fit. I am done talking to you.
Edit 2: This was not meant to sound as aggressive as it did, sorry.
You've been breaking HN's civility rule with bits like "I am done talking to you", "Oh my god stop", "bitching on HN", etc. That's not cool, regardless of how wrong other commenters may be. Please take greater care to be respectful in comments here.
And yet you complained about my many comments. If you just had an issue with their content, you could have said so instead of that, and with specific arguments not just "stop" and "lalala hands in the ears, I don't want to hear you".
>Unlike yours, none of my comments are shitting on the efforts of volunteers that are doing their best to keep people like you happy and making money using a project you're not paying for.
You don't know what I've paid or what I've donated to the PSF since 1998 that I've been using the language, or what the companies I've worked for have done for Python. So it's not your business to talk about me personally as I've not talked about you. Can you stop being rude and ad hominem?
(And of course, any user who has evangelized, worked with, and devoted time to a language pays the opportunity cost, whether he pays for its development directly or not).
The community of a language's users can, and do, have an opinion on its progress and the changes that happen to it, whether it goes against the ideas of the volunteers working on it, or not (and it's not all volunteers, a lot of programmers are paid by corporations to work on OSS projects, including Guido who was paid by Google and now Dropbox, and that way companies often get a say on the direction a project takes).
> If you just had an issue with their content, you could have said so
I did. I did not think I needed an argument to ask you to stop bringing such an incredibly negative attitude to the table.
> You don't know what I've paid
I was referring to Django, to be clear. And whatever you've paid, it's in donations -- that's great! But if you want to see support, you'll need to directly pay people to maintain that support. I believe in fact you yourself said that before, here on HN, about other tech.
> The community of a language's users can, and do, have an opinion on its progress and the changes that happen to it
"as long as that opinion is the same as mine", right?
I mean, here is one of your comments for example:
> Some of us have 10+ years of codebases to maintain, and we don't care for Python 3 features
This is basically saying "I do not care for python 3 features, therefore Python 2 should continue being supported even longer [because I have an old codebase to maintain]".
The argument in a nutshell is that because the transition is hard, the Python team should just give up on the transition and support both. It's an argument I've heard before. The reason it doesn't hold water is because doing so would completely kill the language, for good.
We all, as the python community, collectively admitted that the Python 3 transition was awful. It still is pretty bad, although it has improved a lot. Could still be better! But now, we're on the final stretch and the remaining complaints are from people in similar situations as you: Large Python 2 codebase to maintain, therefore can't switch, therefore "please give us more time, and by more time I mean just forget Python 3 ever happened and come back".
Another place I've heard that argument is back when IE6 went EOL. And went EOL again. And a third time for good measure. And then MS had to declare it dead for good. It was holding the web back and we've been better since. We had the same sort of people back then, asking for "more time", "more leeway", "more support" and "please add ActiveX back to the web we promise we'll switch eventually". Do I need to give an argument why that didn't hold water then either?
I am sorry that you have to deal with that. It sucks. I've been in this position before (different language) and back then, FWIW, we bit the bullet and we migrated. It sucked for two months, and then it didn't. The longer we'd have waited, the longer it would have sucked. I can only recommend you do the same; it's a good long term investment.
At the end of the day, you can try to pull all the numbers you want, the Python team isn't going to suddenly go back on the plan they've been making very clear and insisted on for several years now. Because it would be a betrayal to the rest of the Python community and would severely harm the language and its future. I do believe it's extremely selfish of you at this point to ask that they cater to the group you happen to be a part of, rather than the overall good of the community.
I didn't move the goalposts? I reworded what I previously expressed. If you want to see support, you can pay people to provide that support. Free support ends in 2020.
If you're not paying for it and you are making money off it, I don't see this attitude as being okay. You can ask. You can also be told no!
Python 2 advocates like to bring up the PyPI download numbers as some kind of "reality". But here is the reality: The PSF, governing body for the Python project, has decided years ago that Python 3 will EOL in 2020. It has given ample heads up for everybody to migrate.
Years. That's the reality. This decision didn't come out of nowhere. Don't expect a yes.
> Unlike yours, none of my comments are shitting on the efforts of volunteers that are doing their best to keep people like you happy and making money using a project you're not paying for
This was the line I responded to, and it has nothing to do with support, but with the ability to criticise something you aren't paying for. You introduced the idea that something was being "demanded" so that you could beat up that strawman.
>I did. I did not think I needed an argument to ask you to stop bringing such an incredibly negative attitude to the table.
Not argument or not (and as you said, you didn't think you needed one) you don't have the right to tell me to stop bringing my opinion to the table.
Whether you think it's negative or not, it's not your place to conduct the discussion on HN. Just state your case, and let others state their case. I wouldn't even have left all those comments if I didn't have to defend myself, as most as responses to your demands that I "just stop" and your accusations.
>I was referring to Django, to be clear. And whatever you've paid, it's in donations -- that's great! But if you want to see support, you'll need to directly pay people to maintain that support. I believe in fact you yourself said that before, here on HN, about other tech.
I didn't force anybody to provide me support. I didn't even ask anybody for support for me specifically, and I didn't hold a gun to anybody's head on the matter.
I criticized projects dropping support for Python 2.x, and made my case. Criticizing is not the same as demanding.
>This is basically saying "I do not care for python 3 features, therefore Python 2 should continue being supported even longer [because I have an old codebase to maintain]"
Which is a perfectly reasonable argument, only you omitted the part where I said that the majority of Python users seem to be in the same position (and thus such a drop could be bad for Django itself -- if people are forced to migrated an old project, they might as well bite the bullet and try something else entirely, Node for example).
>The argument in a nutshell is that because the transition is hard, the Python team should just give up on the transition and support both. It's an argument I've heard before. The reason it doesn't hold water is because doing so would completely kill the language, for good.
The transition itself might kill the language, it has already taken far too long with meagre results thus far. It's not impressive that "nearly all popular libraries" have been ported to 3, when it's close to 10 years past 3.x and the majority of users are still on 2.
In any case, there are ways to "support both" that don't kill anything, e.g. making a "merged" Python 2/3 hybrid release that runs both 2.x and 3.x codebases, and is the official CPython going forward.
Or supporting 2.x as longer as needed for 60 or 70% of the users to migrate, as opposed to an arbitrary optimistic cutoff date in 2020, set when people still thought 3.x will get quickly adopted.
>now, we're on the final stretch and the remaining complaints are from people in similar situations as you: Large Python 2 codebase to maintain, therefore can't switch, therefore "please give us more time, and by more time I mean just forget Python 3 ever happened and come back"
Sounds perfectly reasonable. If the largest stakeholders (people with actually large Python codebases) can't speak up, then who can? Newbs that started some small greenfield project with 3.x?
This isn't a numbers contest. Unlike yours, none of my comments are shitting on the efforts of volunteers that are doing their best to keep people like you happy and making money using a project you're not paying for.
> So maybe you want to recheck with reality whether the transition was a success instead of arguing with me?
You completely missed the point.