My first day without Python 2: slack was the first casualty

The great deprecation of Python 2.x has been underway for more than a decade. As of Jan 1, 2020, its dead.

Today I updated a home machine to Ubuntu 20.04. No more python package. We do still have a bit of python 2.7 kicking around:

dpkg -S /usr/bin/python2
python2-minimal: /usr/bin/python2

On update it helpfully removed slack. Now, I would be ok with that (I don’t really use it), but I decided to dig into why, and show you the fix.

First, the reason. The slack desktop package (electron, ugh), has a dependency on python. We have a python3 (pointing to 3.8), but no python.

OK, lets fix it.

mkdir /tmp/x
dpkg-deb -R slack-desktop-4.3.2-amd64.deb /tmp/x
sed -i -e 's?python,??' /tmp/x/DEBIAN/control
dpkg-deb -b /tmp/x /tmp/slack-desktop-fixed.deb
dpkg -i /tmp/slack-desktop-fixed.deb

done. Turns out it wasn’t really needed.

Hopefully the slack folks will update the desktop package to remove the unsupported python2. RIP.