When you launched it, you called it “Python 2.8”. You posted it everywhere to gain traction, and didn’t rename it until the PSF and Guido got you by the ear, so to speak. There was no mention of “everything but str” or whatever, as far as I recall.
It was an outright (and hostile) attempt to fork - something that, going by your words here, I guess you now recognise as a mistake. I guess saying “I screwed up” is hard.
> gvanrossum commented on Dec 10, 2016
> Since I was asked: The project's name (and its binary name) need to
> change. They are misleading. The rest looks acceptable according to
> Python's license. This is not an endorsement (far from it).
> naftaliharris commented on Dec 10, 2016
> I don't mind renaming this project. Any other suggestions for good
> names? I personally like "Pythonesque (/usr/bin/pesque)" the best so
> far, thanks @dbohdan! :-)
>
> @VanL, not that I'm necessarily picking that, but would a name like
> that be acceptable?
(0): https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/issues/47 (1): That's not to say there aren't bona fide intentionally hostile actions that happen, but rather that's how actions that aren't intended to be hostile can be remembered and percieved as such.
I'm not saying it was entirely his fault - certain widely-heard voices in the community had been advocating for this to happen, in practice, for several months; he saw an opportunity and went for it. I just object to the rewrite of history to justify the mistakes of the past.
Have you considered that not everyone who forks something participates in the original community?
> I just object to the rewrite of history to justify the mistakes of the past.
So far there has been no evidence for the stated claim, just supposition and rumour. So as-is there's no reason for anyone here to believe that "history is being rewritten" aside from easily-mistaken word of mouth.
These days most discussions over the internet happen via the written word, so it's difficult to believe that you can't find records from IRC, Github, or Email to support your contention that it was hostile.
This matches the pattern of Python.org developers and python 3 aficionados being unnecessarily hostile and condescending to the concerns of Python 2 language users. You saw that in 2010; you saw it again in 2015; and you can see it in these threads today.
If people still want to work on Python 2 projects that's fine and it's their choice, but it's time to just let the rest of us go our own way.
It's certainly possible that there are parts of the migration that would be tricky, a quick skim of the file didn't give me any obvious ones, but it's also huge and hard to read, so I very well could have missed something.
Most of the truly challenging things to migrate involved some combination of extension modules, heavy metaprogramming (eval/exec), and apis which change significantly between 2 and 3 (most of which are string related, but some libraries also decided to do backwards incompatible things)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144713
* https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/issues/47#issuecomment-277081725(friendly note: code blocks break clickable links)
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144713
2: https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/issues/47#issuecomm...
At the time, the author stated:
> I picked [the name "Python 2.8"] initially since when talking with friends about this project it conveyed pretty darn immediately what the project is and does. I'd be very keen to hear people's suggestions for alternate names!
This was no mistake or screw up at all. In fact, the project served his purpose for the time, and even though he's moved on, there are others who like it enough to maintain or improve it.
A fork is (or can be) a healthy, natural thing that happens.