As you may recall, CASSANDRA-10190 [1] introduced Python 3 support for cqlsh. This change will be landing in 4.0. In the course of development and discussion spanning years, it was decided to retain support for Python 2. In the meantime, Python 2 sunsetted (a year ago [2]). I hadn't seen a discussion about whether we intend to carry on support for Python 2, so I'm raising one here.
4.0 is a major release and we have an opportunity to drop support at this milestone. It has been mentioned that it will not be acceptable to do in a minor or patch release, so if it's not done for 4.0, we will need to wait for the next major. I do understand that many in the project would like majors on a more frequent interval post-4.0, but at this time we don't know when that will be. I advocate for dropping support ASAP. I expect that users should not be inconvenienced by this -- I am not aware of a major distro that has not had python3 for years. Dropping python2 support does not mean that we would do work to rip out python2-compatible code, just that we wouldn't advertise support and any package requirements would be adjusted. We benefit by removing the need to test multiple runtimes, and we wouldn't be concerned with fixing python2-specific issues that may arise on the EOL runtime [3]. I look forward to the discussion. -- Adam Holmberg e. adam.holmb...@datastax.com w. www.datastax.com [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-10190 [2] https://www.python.org/doc/sunset-python-2/ [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-16400