[Biopython-dev] Ideas for Biopython 2.0

Tiago Antão tiagoantao at gmail.com
Wed Jun 21 18:16:00 UTC 2017


On 21 June 2017 at 11:44, João Rodrigues <j.p.g.l.m.rodrigues at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Regarding the pledge, the more I think about it the more conflicted I
> feel. On one hand, this will push adoption of Py3.x for the end-user and
> allow us to take advantage of new language features. On the other hand, I
> still work on clusters with system Py2.6 and with code that chokes with
> anything over 2.5.
>

This will mean that we, with our scant resources would be given more
support than many of the other projects out there. More than CPython, or
some scientific libraries.
With regards to existing installations: I think the argument works the
other way around: The Python community is mostly deprecating Python 2 in
2020 so system administrators and individual users have plenty of time to
adapt, lets hope everybody is competent enough. If not, I do not think it
is fair for us to be supporting the burden people that were well warned in
advance of this change and dud not take appropriate action.


> For Biopython 2, I think it might be reasonable to say look, we support
> only 3.x, and maintain versions 1.x supporting Py2.x but dropping support
> altogether might be a bad move.
>

This means revisiting a previous discussion and mostly be alone out there
compared to many Python projects.
This is less bad than having biopython 2 supporting python 2.

Notice that maintaining Python 2 support after 2020 might be problematic:
at least in the code parts that depend on libraries that will require
Python 3.
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