The Python 2 packages set will remain available, however, it will not be built by Hydra or ofBorg. While some have expressed their desire to have a Python2 set around, there has hardly been any effort to keep it working.
Note 2.7 as well as the upstream supported 3.6 through 3.9 are available on master [2]. Versions 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9 will now be built by Hydra. I think we may drop building 3.7 for 21.03 though, to reduce the maintenance burden.
Hydra is not building Python 2 packages directly I suppose, but for AFAIK there are still some packages that need python 2 and some python deps in order to at least build. So maybe it’d be more accurate to announce that python 2 packages won’t be built unless needed by something else?
Gnuradio3.7 for instance will need Python 2 and our community wants it to stay with us:
Now 2.7 is gone and we have 3.9 instead we went from around 9200 packages to 10500.
I think we should stop building 3.7 as well, to reduce the load on both us and Hydra. From now on we would then build the whole package set for two Python versions: the current python3 (python38) and the future python3 (python39).
Of course interpreters for other versions are available, and if other packages depend on packages from those package sets they will be build as well.
stop building just means that hydra wont populate a binary cache. The related package set will be available, but you will have to rebuild anything that’s not in cache.
And there’s more of a likelihood that a package may be broken, because no one is verifying if works before merging changes in.