Slackware 15 without python2?

It's just the build system we're talking about. It's got nothing to do with the "browser experience". My system is going to have everything I need to compile the software that I use. What do I care if I have autoconf-2.13 (program suffix so it can coexist)? Python2 can coexist with Python 3 as well. I will keep it around for as long as I need to, I don't give a toss about ideals of correctness.

I use Firefox on my mobile devices too. I hate Chrome on Android, because it doesn't respect my choices. For example, it insists on loading the last session and there's no setting to override that behaviour. I don't ever want that, it's a nuisance and opens the door to tomfoolery. It also doesn't support extensions like Ublock Origin, like mobile Firefox does. If other users knew what they could have, they might seek it out too but no... things like Chrome and/or vendor supplied software like "Samsung Internet Browser" and its ilk, are thrust in their faces. They can't even be removed on a typical consumer (non rooted) device.

I've been thinking more on this and have partly changed my opinion, to agree with putting Python2 in /pasture. As long as it's there, and the package does the right thing (doesn't step on the Python 3 environment). I didn't strongly disagree with that. The reason I think I was wrong to want to keep it in the distro is because it's unreasonable to expect Pat to maintain it, after it is deprecated during the maintenance cycle of Slackware 15 (as was pretty much said by someone) and pasture is kind of like use at your own risk for as long as it still works for you. Python2's use cases are likely to be pretty rare after that point anyway. I'm sure even Mozilla will bite the bullet and upgrade their build toolchain environment, though I don't envy them the task.

Originally Posted by TheRealGrogan I'm sure even Mozilla will bite the bullet and upgrade their build toolchain environment, though I don't envy them the task.

They made their own bed..

Originally Posted by TheRealGrogan It's just the build system we're talking about. It's got nothing to do with the "browser experience". My system is going to have everything I need to compile the software that I use. What do I care if I have autoconf-2.13 (program suffix so it can coexist)? Python2 can coexist with Python 3 as well. I will keep it around for as long as I need to, I don't give a toss about ideals of correctness.

I agree that it in these cases, it doesn't really cause a problem to coexist, but the fact we have to do that with a major open source program like Firefox is pretty ridiculous. They're forward in some cases, requiring Pat to include rust in 14.2 to be able to build a newer version of Firefox, but then we're still stuck with an ancient version of autoconf, requiring everyone to make special arrangements to build Firefox. Unless they port over to python3, people are going to have to make those same special arrangements for python (I imagine some distros are already making those arrangements since they've moved to python3).

Originally Posted by TheRealGrogan I use Firefox on my mobile devices too. I hate Chrome on Android, because it doesn't respect my choices. For example, it insists on loading the last session and there's no setting to override that behaviour. I don't ever want that, it's a nuisance and opens the door to tomfoolery. It also doesn't support extensions like Ublock Origin, like mobile Firefox does. If other users knew what they could have, they might seek it out too but no... things like Chrome and/or vendor supplied software like "Samsung Internet Browser" and its ilk, are thrust in their faces. They can't even be removed on a typical consumer (non rooted) device.

And this just goes to show that there is no one-design-fits-all. I prefer Chrome to keep my tabs active and only close them out when I choose to close them out. I would love to have extension support, but Firefox's UI kept me from using it (plus AdAway works fine for system-wide blocking). I tried using Firefox for over 2 weeks, just to see if I could get used to it, but I constantly hated it. Maybe there's a way to tweak it, but when I last researched it, I couldn't find anything.

Mobile Firefox is a slower renderer than Chrome, but I find Ublock Origin more than makes up for that. Note that I don't use mobile versions of pages, I have "request desktop version" enabled and I manage to navigate OK by pinch zooming. So blocking crap really helps me.

One of these days I'm going to try the new Mobile Vivaldi, as I'm sure it will give me a preference on how I want the browser to load. I loved the Vivaldi browser on Linux, but phased out its use because it's binary, and I'll be left with no recourse when the binary stops working due to system changes. ALREADY, if the linker finds the nss/nspr in my /opt/firefox the Vivaldi binaries are broken (using the system's, from Slackware's mozilla-nss package is still good). Also, Firefox has gotten close in real world performance nowadays (practically so, benchmark scores are another matter). At least my optimized builds are pretty damned good.

It's not that uncommon for a distro to provide multiple versions of the autotools programs. I don't expect Slackware to do that, as it's more DIY but it will build one for you during the .SlackBuild if you use it to compile Firefox. I just installed it myself with suffix, to /usr/local because I'm going to be needing it, I build every release of Firefox. There was a time when you needed multiple automake/autoconf versions installed, I remember hitting such snags often back in the good old days. Nowadays you need to be familiar with toolchain components like cmake, meson, ninja etc. if you want to be able to build all your stuff.

LLVM 9.0 was just released
https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llv...er/135304.html

Fedora's begun the process of removing Python 2:

Python 2 exodus is happening now

Isn't there a translation layer for python 2 <-> python 3?

I think I stumbled upon something called "six"?

Originally Posted by SCerovec Isn't there a translation layer for python 2 <-> python 3?

There is, and it’s installed in Slackware-current (l/python-six). But it’s far from enough to get rid of Python 2.

Six is intended to allow developers to write Python code that will work as well under Python 2 as under Python 3. But it can only help if developers actually use it. If you have a Python 2 script that does not use six, you still need to port that code to six before you can run it under Python 3—and if you have to do that you might as well port to Python 3 directly and skip six altogether.

There's also this in Python 2:

from __future__ import *

Neither this nor six are compatibility laters. This is to help you write Python 2 code that would be as forward compatible as possible.