> If your code is protected from untrusted user data and the internet, Python 2 is actually a really nice language that doesn't constantly force rewrites.
If Python 2 is acceptable for your use case, then you could stay on an old version of Python 3 just fine as well.
I think the point was making sure that code won’t break in the future. If you tell someone „use python 2 to run my script“, you know it’s going to work basically forever because the latest python 2 won’t be changed. That’s not true for python 3. I still think it’s a bad argument, but that’s what I understood the idea as.
That argument still seems inconsistent to me, since saying "use python 2, pin your dependences and never upgrade python so your script runs forever" is the same as "use python 3.12, pin your dependences and never upgrade python so your script runs forever".
Although 3.1 also meets that criteria. And even with python 2, the dependencies could still update. The main thing is that it's the not-updating that will make your code run forever (on any system, language, version), not the fact that it's python 2.
No you can't. For example I use a script to compress scanned PDFs by combining individually processed JBIG2 images and that script hasn't been updated for more than a decade: https://github.com/agl/jbig2enc/blob/master/pdf.py It works and generates perfectly good PDFs. No it doesn't work with Python 3 because it mixes bytes and strings copiously. I could spend half an hour upgrading it to work with Python 3 but there's no reason to.
Don't forget the whole reason why Python 3 exists is because it broke compatibility with Python 2. Plenty of old unmaintained scripts were forever stuck in Python 2. Not to mention an old version of Python 3 actually performs worse than Python 2.
> I could spend half an hour upgrading it to work with Python 3 but there's no reason to.
How about empowering people other than yourself to understand how the code works, rather than relying on them to decipher the precise way in which you "mixed bytes and strings copiously"?
What if someone else did it for you? Would you reject the PR on principle?
The code was not written by me. I merely found this code useful.
If the author, Adam, or someone else upgraded it I would be happy using it with Python 3. But the code works as is. I'm also happy using it with Python 2.
Nothing is untrusted. I trust my own scanner. It's just that it produces files that are too large. And when it is told to reduce file size, it reduces resolution instead of using good compression.
If Python 2 is acceptable for your use case, then you could stay on an old version of Python 3 just fine as well.