Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Kickoff for Communications Work on the Python 2 Sunsetting
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2019 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Python's 2.x line will reach End of Life on January 1, 2020, meaning that the maintainers of Python 2 will stop supporting it, even for security patches. Many institutions and codebases have not yet ported their code from Python 2 to Python 3. And many of them haven't even heard yet about the upcoming EOL. Volunteers have made many resources to help publicize and educate, but there's still more work to be done.
So the Python Software Foundation has contracted with my firm, Changeset Consulting, to help communicate about the sunsetting of Python 2. The high-level goal for Changeset's involvement is to help users through the end of the transition, help with communication so volunteers are not overwhelmed, and help update public-facing assets so core developers are not overwhelmed.
During this project (starting now and going till the end of April 2020), Changeset's goals are:
So, towards those goals, you'll see me with my colleagues:
For accountability, Changeset will provide reporting via:
I'm going to be asking for a lot of help along the way from the Python community: meeting with us, answering our questions, double-checking our drafts for accuracy, publicizing that EOL page to your circles, setting up some parties for January 1st. Thanks in advance and let's get the Python user base further along towards enjoying the shininess of Python 3.