2024-09-29

Goodbye, Python 2! Hello, New Buildbot!

At long last, Void is saying goodbye to Python 2. Python ended support for Python 2 in 2020, but Void still had over 200 packages that depended on it. Since then, Void contributors have updated, patched, or removed these packages. For the moment, Python 2 will remain in the repositories as python2 (along with python2-setuptools and python2-pip). python is now a metapackage that will soon point to python3.

One of the biggest blockers for this project was some of Void’s own infrastructure: our buildbot, which builds all packages for delivery to users. For a long time, we were stuck on buildbot 0.8.12 (released on 21 April 2015 and using Python 2), because it was complex to get working, had many moving parts, and was fairly fragile. To update it to a modern version would require significant time and effort.

Now, we move into the future: we’ve upgraded our buildbot to version 4.0, and it is now being managed via our orchestration system, Nomad, to improve reliability, observability, and reproducibility in deployment. Check out the 2023 Infrastructure Week series of blog posts for more info about how and why Void uses Nomad.

Visit the new buildbot dashboard at build.voidlinux.org and watch your packages build!