Python version conflicts

Hi Matt, Jay and everyone: Now that Python 2.7 is deprecated, what are the plans to support Python 3.x for scripting?

[jay (support)]

Note that "not supported" does not mean that it'll immediately break. We know we're going to need to migrate to Python 3, and we're planning how that's going to work. One of the biggest issues is that macOS doesn't come with Python 3 prior to Catalina and with Catalina you still had to install Python 3 separately from the command line developer tools. Also, the majority of our users don't upgrade macOS immediately (which given the quality issues with recent releases is generally a wise decision). So whatever solution we come up with has to work back some number of macOS releases. This will likely mean that we'll have to increase our system requirements (currently it's 10.7 or later) because we will have to ship our own Python 3 install, and the testing requirements are significant for each macOS release we support. The most current Python installers for macOS require Mavericks (10.9) or later for instance.

So, lots of technical issues paired with business decisions.

I just set up a new Mac mini; one of the first steps was (maybe wrong) to check if python is installed, I got a warning it is version 2.7 and deprecated, I should install python3 from the command line developer tools even offering to do it for me. Done.

Later I installed Indigo and at some point I needed to install paho-mqtt, no pip installed. pip3 was and I could install it, but ofc it isn't being found. "easy_install pip" and all hell broke loose with syntax errors. It is installing pip-21 which doesn't support Py2.7 anymore. After some digging I managed to install pip:

sudo easy_install pip==20.3.4

Maybe this helps somebody until Indigo can leave Python2.7 behind.

That's why paho is bundled with the MQTT Connector plugin. Installing it is a pain.