Task #5095
Updated by Davide Pesavento about 4 years ago
**Python 2 reached its EOL on Jan 1, 2020** macOS MacOS 10.15 deprecated `python` and `python2`, urging users to switch to `python3` (3.7.3 at the moment). It is very likely that macOS 10.16 will not include python 2 anymore. Homebrew does not offer a python 2 formula anymore. Ubuntu 18.04 only comes with python 3.6 only in the default install. 2.7 is still available in the official repo, but it's an additional package that we're requiring users to install. CentOS 8 similarly also does not provide python 2 by default, and goes a step further by not providing a `/usr/bin/python` symlink *even if* python 2 is installed by the user. Other RHEL-derived distros are presumably following the same approach. Fedora uses python 3 as default since version 23, and has recently switched `/usr/bin/python` to point to python 3 with the Fedora 31 release. Debian is working on removing python 2 support. On Arch Linux, python 3 has been the default for several years. Gentoo has a configurable `/usr/bin/python` symlink, pointing to python 3 by default. It's time to switch our build system (`waf`) to require python 3. Initially the minimum required version should be 3.5 in order to support Ubuntu 16.04; after #5087, once #5087 is done, the requirement can be raised to >=3.6.