Libindic is broken on Python 2 now, should we fix or officially drop?

[Akshay S Dinesh]

Hi all,

When we moved to namespaced packages in 2017, we inadvertently dropped support for python 2. Namespaced packages are natively supported only in python 3.3 and therefore import command fails in versions prior to that.

(Note that libindic-web gets around this by using importlib to import)

https://packaging.python.org/guides/packaging-namespace-packages/ for more information.

Now, we could re-add support for 2.x by moving things to pkgutil-style (which is practically just about adding __init__.py in top level modules).

Or, alternatively we could just officially drop 2.x by stating so in README, etc.

Python 2 has been sunset in January 2020 and libindic has been having less and less contributions thanks to dependencies being difficult to get right.

Jishnu mentioned that Vasudev did a lot of work to make things support both 2 and 3.

Santhosh's comment is awaited. Vasudev, if you are reading this, please weigh in.

If we want to support 2.x we have to move to pkutil-style namespacing. That preserves namespaced packages, but adds support for 2.3+

But, this has to be done for *all* modules and distributions. It can't be partially or incrementally done.

I can do this if someone gives me write access to all repos and maintainer access to pypi

Akshay