Whether you install 12.3 from scratch or upgrade from a previous version, it appears that the contents of /usr/bin/python are simply gone, leaving behind only some broken symlinks. Now, in macOS 12.3, apps and scripts invoking Python 2.7 will fail because the Python 2 interpreter simply won’t be there. Starting with macOS 12.0.1, if a program or script called for the Python 2 interpreter, the user would see a warning that the invoking app will not work with future versions of macOS and that it needs to be updated.

Apple admins in particular have gravitated to Python as a way to automate management, in part because its support for parsing data structures such as JSON and XML is superior to that of shell-scripting languages such as bash and zsh. Python 2.7 has been bundled with macOS since version 10.8 it’s well-embedded in the Mac ecosystem. Apple has waited two-plus years to actually pull the switch.

In June 2019, as part of preparing for the release of macOS Catalina 10.15, Apple announced that future versions of macOS would not include Python 2.7. The two versions are different enough that code written in one won’t execute reliably or at all in the other. Coders who’d been using Python 2 were urged to switch to Python 3. That deadline was then pushed to January 1, 2020. To recap: The Python Software Foundation originally intended to sunset Python 2 in 2015 at that point, the group said, it wouldn’t publish any more bug fixes or security patches for that version of the language. Here’s what it could mean to you and what you can do to prepare. The promise itself shouldn’t have been a surprise, either, given that the Python Software Foundation-which maintains the Python codebase-originally said that it would be sunsetting Python 2 way back in 2008.Īnd yet the imminent removal of Python 2.7- macOS 12.3 is expected to ship sometime this spring-still demands attention from Apple admins. Now Apple is simply making good on that promise. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple is removing Python 2.7 from the upcoming macOS 12.3 release: As far back as 2019, the company said it was deprecating the scripting and programming language and that Python would not be included with future versions of the OS.

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