Add note here to explain that this does not prevent nor discourage library author to release 2 version of their software one Python 3 only and the other python 2.
This page gather information and links to resources allowing to release a library that stop supporting an older version of Python without causing too much disruption for users who haven't upgraded to this new version.
Wether you are a user, or a developer, being aware of the issue listed here, at least the main points should ease lots of the pain.
- Help and encourage users to install pip 9.0+
- Help and encourage users to install setuptools 24.3+
- As maintainer use
setup(..., python_requires='>=3.4')new option. - do use
pip install [-e] .and do not invokesetup.pydirectly. - Fail early at install time if on Python 2.
Up until December 2016 it was hard to publish a new major version of library that changed requirements in Python version and mark it as such so that user system will not try to upgrade said library.
With the recent changes in Python packaging this is now possible.
As an example let's look at the example of the fictious library.
fictious1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 are compatible Python 2.7 and 3.3+fictious2.0 has been released and is python 3.4+ only.
As a Python 2.7 user, if I don't pay attention, or if the library is not correctly tagged, if I issue the following:
$ python -c 'import fictious; print(fictious.__version__)'
1.3.2
$ pip install fiction --upgrade
Either my system will install 2.0, which will not work, on the worst case scenario, or fail to install, in which case I will not get the critical 1.4 upgrade.
If you are already a Python 3 user, you should not encounter a lot of disruption. Please still check that the libraries you use follow best practices not to break for Python 2 users. Python is a community regardless of which python version you have to (or decided to) run, making sure that everything works make the community strong.
Make sure you have Pip >= 9.0, this is especially important if you have Python 2 installations. Having pip 9.0+ is not a guaranty to flawless upgrade. But pip 9.0+ does have a number of safety check not available on previous versions.
Having a version of pip < 9.0 can lead your system to try to upgrade to non-compatible versions of Python packages even if these are marked as non-compatible.
Help as many other users as possible to install pip >=9.0, for the transition, it is the slowest part of the ecosystem to update, and is the only piece that requires action of all Python users.
The simplest way to make sure all is up to date is to run the following for each installation of Python:
$ pip install --upgrade setuptools pip
This will install the latest version of pip and setuptools.
You can issue the following to see the version of pip:
$ pip --version 9.0.0
All good.
If you are on a system for which no wheel is available, pip will try to
install a source distribution (aka sdist).
Installing an sdist will require setuptools make sure you have setuptools
>=24.2.0 (mnemonic: 2-42, why
42
?) or building Python 3 only libraries is likely to fail. In particular if
library authors have taken time to mark their library as Python 3 only, the
python_requires argument to setup() may not be recognized and installation
will fail.
Use the following to check setuptools version :
$ python -c 'import setuptools; print(setuptools.__version__)
24.2.0
Again make sure to upgrade pip and setuptools to make sure you have an up to date system:
$ pip install --upgrade setuptools pip
If you are using a custom local package index, for example if you are working
at a company with private packages, make sure it implement correctly
pep-503 and let pip knows about
the python_requires field. This mostly mean that the html you are exposing
should get a data-python-requires data attribute with the (html escaped)
version specifier.
Note that at the time of this writing the patches to pypi.python.org are not
deployed yet but should hopefully be deployed soon.
Warehouse and Legacy PyPI have received various patches to insure they support this new functionality.
You can publish a package with the requires_python metadata now, it will
be correctly exposed once pypi is deployed.
As a library author one of the most important factor in a smooth transition is planning and communication, letting your user base know in advance that the transition is happening and what step to take is critical for a transition.
For your library code here the steps you need to take to ensure that installation will fail in the least number of case:
You need to release your new packages version with setuptools version 24.2.0 or above. You can also use one of the alternate package manager that can set the Requires-Python metadata field. Without this, pip 9.0 will try to install non-compatible version of your software on Python 2. This version of setuptools is recent (July 20, 2016) and this possible thank to the work of Xavier Fernandez
Add the following to your setup.py
setup(
...
python_requires='>=3.3'
...
)
Changes >=3.3 accordingly depending on what version your library decides to
support. In particular you can use >=2.6 or >=3.5 ! Note that this also
support the compable with syntax: ~=2.5 (meaning, >=2.5 and <3.
This will make PyPI aware that your package is Python 3.3+ only, and allow pip to be made aware of this.
Thus as long as your user have a recent enough version of pip, and setuptools they will get the right version of your library.
It is recommended not to invoke setup.py directly either with install or
develop subcommands. These may not correctly resolve dependencies, and can
install incompatible versions of dependencies. Please recommend and use pip install . and pip install -e . for regular and developer install.
Check in scripts, and documentation that the correct installation command is used.
These are not mandatory but should make the transition seamless by warning your user early enough and providing useful error messages.
Add a warning at runtime early on master (before switching to Python 3 only)
import warnings
import sys
if sys.version_info < (3,):
warnings.warn('You are using master of `Frobulator` with Python 2. '
'Frobulator will soon be Python 3 only. '
'See this issue to know more.',
UserWarning)
Your Python 2 user have a chance to upgrade, or get off master, (for example on the LTS branch).
Add an error early at import at runtime with a clear error message, leave the
early import compatible Python 2 for users to not be welcomed with a useless
SyntaxError. You are allowed to use multi-line strings in error messages.
Error at import time will happen on system with old version of pip and setuptools. Keep in mind that saying the package is Python 3 only is not a lot more helpful than a Syntax error. The most reasonable reason would be out of data pip and setuptools:
import sys
if sys.version_info < (3,):
Raise ImportError(
"""You are running Frobulator 6.0 on Python 2
Unfortunately Frobulator 6.0 and above are not compatible with Python 2
anymore, and you still ended up with this version installed on your system.
That's a bummer. Sorry about that. It should not have happen. Make sure you
have pip >= 9.0 to avoid this kind of issues, as well as setuptools >= 24.2:
$ pip install pip setuptools --upgrade
You have various other choices
- install an older version of Frobulator:
$ pip install 'frobulator<6.0'
- Upgrade your system to use Python 3.
It would be great if you can figure out how this version ended up being
installed, and try to check how to prevent that for future users.
See the following url for more up to date informations:
https://i.am.an/url
""")
Make sure your version number match pep 440 or you will get surprises during
beta in particular as the sdist and wheel will appear as being different
versions, in particular sdist (during beta/rc/post) can appear with a greater
version number than wheels. Pip thus try to install the sdist instead of the
wheel, which have more chance of failing, in particular with pre 24.2 versions
of setuptools.
The regular expression to check for validity of pep440 can be find below:
^([1-9]\\d*!)?(0|[1-9]\\d*)(\\.(0|[1-9]\\d*))*((a|b|rc)(0|[1-9]\\d*))?(\\.post(0|[1-9]\\d*))?(\\.dev(0|[1-9]\\d*))?
You can mark your library as dependent on setuptools greater than 24.3 starting now, this will insure that during the next upgrade (when the packages drop python 2 support) will have the right version of setuptools.
Of course regardless of all the care you will take for your library to no break and to install only on python 2, you will likely have cases where it still end up being installed on incompatible versions of Python. Simply because users upgrades rarely and only an old version of pip or setuptools is enough to make the all update process broken.
Leave setup.py python 2 compatible and fail early. If you detect Python 2
raise a clear error message and ask user to make sure they have pip >9.0 (or
migrate to Python 3). You can (try to) conditionally import pip and check for
its version but this might not be the same pip. Failing early is important to
make sure the Python installation does not install and incompatible version.
Otherwise user code can fail at runtime arbitrary later in the future, which can
be a difficult to debug and fix. Get inspiration from the message of failure at
runtime, and adapt for installation time.
If you control dependant packages, Make sure to include conditional dependencies depending on the version of Python.
This is a collection of "mitigation" or "solutions" you will find on the web and that you will hear about. This is an attempt to acknowledge them, and explain why they can't work and what are their drawbacks before you attempt to implement them.
It is possible to release a meta-package that has virtually no code and rely on conditional dependency to install its actual core code on the user system. For example, Frob-6.0 could be a meta-package which depends on Frob-real-py2 on Python <3.0, and Frob-real-py3 on Python >= 3.4. While this approach is doable this can make imports confusing.
Moreover, upgrading your package may need the user to explicitly tell pip to
upgrade dependencies as pip install -U frob will only upgrade the meta-package.
Pip (used to) support a "feature" where a sdist ending in -pyX.Y.tar.gz would
only be seen as compatible on Python X.Y, thus it used to be possible to
publish multiple sdist of a package targeting various python version.
Though it is not possible anymore to upload multiple sdist on PyPI. This solution is thus not possible.
Releasing a package only using wheel for a given python version is doable, but this will break downstream packages that may require the original source to reproduce the build.
You might wonder why all this, it's 2016 already, so how come all these issues ? Python 3 has been out for 8+ years now !
Well there are many reasons to this, first of all, this issue mostly affect libraries that are currently python 2 and Python 3 compatible at the same time. Many libraries have transitioned from Python 2-only to Python 2 + 3. And the issue of transitioning to Python 3 only is relatively recent. Technically it can also apply to libraries that are only stopping support for 2.6, or even are already Python 3 only, but are starting to stop support for earlier versions of Python. For example a library releasing a Python 3.4+ only version.
Python 3.3 was release end of 2012, and was the first version to support
(again) u as a prefix for Unicode string. It was one of the first minor
version of Python 3 that saw a majority of single-source project working both
on Python 2 and Python 3. These are the Project that will likely be affected by
this issue.
The introduction of Python 3 was chaotic, there are still strong argument both in Python 2 and Python 3 camps. In the one suffering the most from this are users. Starting with the fact that inevitably some libraries will stop support for Python 2 and release Python 3 only library. And that inevitably some system will will not be upgraded to Python 3 how can we ensure that users get the least breakage as possible ? And what are the best practices to follow.