Python 2 & Its Packages Likely To Be Dropped For Fedora 32

While Fedora 30 isn't even out the door yet and Fedora 32 not coming out until roughly one year from now, we already know one big change on the table: dropping Python 2 and packages depending upon it.

On 1 January 2020 is when Python 2.x is officially set to be end-of-life by upstream and for years Fedora and other Linux distributions have been pushing for the move to Python 3.x. While most are now defaulting to Python 3 as the default Python implementation, Python 2 and various Python-2-only packages are still shipped and common by different Linux distributions.

With Fedora 32 coming in H1'2020 past the EOL of Python 2, it's only logical that will be the release where they do the gutting of Python 2. That's been confirmed this week by the change proposal to retire Python 2. Python 2 and its sub-packages are expected to be removed from Fedora beginning in F32.

Though the door is still open for FESCo granting exceptions on select Python 2 packages if the need arises next year. Also, there is talk of a legacy python27 package that would still be available for interested users/developers that find the need to run legacy Python code on their systems.

More discussion on this anticipated change proposal via the Fedora mailing list. We're likely to see similar positioning of Python 2 with Ubuntu 20.04 especially with that being a Long Term Support release.