Title: Python 2.7 cleanup is progressing
Author: Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org>
Posted: 2020-09-28
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: dev-lang/python:2.7

Python 2.7 has reached its end-of-life by 2019-12-31, and many projects
have removed Python 2 support since.  During the last few months we have
been working hard to migrate Gentoo to Python 3, and we have finally
reached the point making it possible for the vast majority of our users
to run a system free of Python 2.7 packages (except for the interpreter
itself).

The few remaining high profile packages (e.g. dev-python/cython)
are preserving Python 2.7 only for a very few uncommon packages.
For this reason, we have decided to create new revisions of them having
Python 2.7 removed.  If you do not need Python 2.7 there, your package
manager should upgrade these packages to the new revisions.

Please note that you may need to manually uninstall any Python 2.7
packages installed from third-party repositories and/or run `emerge
--depclean` first to remove orphan packages.  The recommended process
for Portage users is:

    emerge --depclean
    emerge -vDuU @world
    emerge --depclean

Please note that the Python 2.7 interpreter (without additional Python
packages) remains necessary to build a few high profile packages,
in particular Chromium, Mozilla software and PyPy.  If you build either
of these packages from source, you will not be able to permanently
remove Python 2.7 from your system.

We are going to preserve CPython 2.7 (and PyPy2.7) for as long
as necessary and provide security fixes to the best of our ability.
However, please note that we are not able to dedicate resources to
auditing Python 2.7's code and with little community interest in that,
it should be considered potentially vulnerable.

If your projects still rely on Python 2.7, we would like to once again
encourage you to migrate them to Python 3.  However, if you really need
to run them, we suggest using a virtualenv.  To create a new Python 2.7
environment, install dev-python/virtualenv and use the following option:

    virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 ...

To create a PyPy2.7 environment:

    virtualenv -p /usr/bin/pypy ...

Modern versions of pip should be able to automatically select older
versions of packages that still support Python 2.7.  Please note that
these versions are generally no longer supported.  They can be buggy,
vulnerable or simply incompatible with one another.

Please do not forget to add dev-lang/python:2.7 to your @world set
or it may get depcleaned once all package dependencies are gone.