I’m a Gentoo developer for over 10 years already. I’ve been doing a lot of different things throughout that period. However, Python was pretty much always somewhere within my area of interest. I don’t really recall how it all started. Maybe it had something to do with Portage being written in Python. Maybe it was the natural next step after programming in Perl.
I feel like the upcoming switch to Python 3.9 is the last step in the prolonged effort of catching up with Python. Over the last years, we’ve been working real hard to move Python support forward, to bump neglected packages, to enable testing where tests are available, to test packages on new targets and unmask new targets as soon as possible. We have improved the processes a lot. Back when we were switching to Python 3.4, it took almost a year from the first false start attempt to the actual change. We started using Python 3.5 by default after upstream dropped bugfix support for it. In a month from now, we are going to start using Python 3.9 even before 3.10 final is released.
I think this is a great opportunity to look back and see what changed in the Gentoo Python ecosystem, in the last 10 years.
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