[gentoo-dev] News item review: Python 3.6 to become the default target

[Michał Górny]

Hello, everyone.

Please review the following news item. The 'xx'-es will be replaced with
the publication date, making the deadline appropriately pub + 1 month.

---
Title: Python 3.6 to become the default target
Author: Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o>
Posted: 2018-05-xx
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: dev-lang/python:3.5

On 2018-06-xx, Python 3.6 will replace Python 3.5 in the default Python
targets for Gentoo systems.  The new default targets will be:

    PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_6"
    PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_6"

If you have not overriden the value of those variables on your system,
then your package manager will want to use the new targets immediately.
In order to prevent dependency conflicts, please clean stray packages
and rebuild/upgrade all packages with USE flag changes after the change,
e.g.:

    emerge --depclean
    emerge -1vUD @world
    emerge --depclean

Please note that upgrading dependencies in place may cause some
of the package dependencies to be temporarily missing.  While this
should not affect scripts that are already fully loaded, it may cause
ImportErrors while starting Python scripts or loading additional
modules (only scripts running Python 3.5 are affected).

In order to improve stability of the upgrade, you may choose to
temporarily enable both targets, i.e. set in /etc/portage/make.conf
or its equivalent:

    PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_5 python3_6"
    PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_5"

This will cause the dependencies to include both Python 3.5 and 3.6
support on the next system upgrade.  Once all packages are updated,
you can restart your scripts, remove the custom setting and run another
upgrade to remove support for Python 3.5.

If you would like to postpone the switch to Python 3.6, you can copy
the current value of PYTHON_TARGETS and/or PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET
to /etc/portage/make.conf or its equivalent:

    PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_5"
    PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_5"

If you would like to migrate your systems earlier, you can do the same
with the new value.

If you are still using Python 3.4, please consider switching to a newer
version as it is reaching its end-of-life.  The end-of-life dates
for the currently used versions are:

  Python 3.4        2019-03-16
  Python 2.7        2020-01-01
  Python 3.5        2020-09-13 [1]

[1]:https://devguide.python.org/#status-of-python-branches

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny