trim six usage

[a-detiste]

No description provided.

[vmwclabot]

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[mtsvetanov]

Hello @a-detiste, could you please elaborate the motivation about this change?

I know that python 2 was EOL-ed 4 and a half years ago and that the six module itself hasn't been maintained/supported after 2021. However what are the concrete reasons for cleaning it up here? Are there known CVEs that affect it? Or it is the inconvenience (and risk) of having an extra dependency?

Thanks!

[a-detiste]

I posted a little write up here: https://wiki.debian.org/Python3-six-removal

My fear of having things mysteriously start to break back then was real.

For example pytest depends on requests which depends on urllib3 which dependend on six.

So when Urllib3 was updated from 1.x to 2.x we had in the whole Debian distro like 30 packages that had an undeclared dependency on six which all started failing building on the same day.

We have since identified a longish list of deprecated library that needs to be slowly & carefully removed.

The new emergency is distutils remove which hinders the upgrade to Python3.12.

https://wiki.debian.org/Python/Dead%20Batteries

So your little contribution would be greatly appreciated.

[a-detiste]

six is only a polyfilm that enable to write Python2.x compatible code, it doesn't have any other purpose

[a-detiste]

On your side it's a -63 +38 diff, so it means less code to maintain. The knoweledge of what six was and what was it's purpose is quickly fading away. Some upstreams have already started a cargo cult around it :-(

[vmwclabot]

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[StefanHristov-Broadcom]

Unfortunately, pyVmomi is used in various non-distro setups that still rely on Python 2.x
This is why Python 2.7 is still officially supported by pyVmomi. When we drop this support - or fork pyVmomi for Python 3 only, we will gladly drop the usage of "six".