Discontinuing Beautiful Soup 3.x in 2021, after Python 2 sunset

[leonardr]

Recently I was tangentially involved in the Python 2 sunsetting process, and I realized that I need to do something about Beautiful Soup 3.x, the Python 2-only series last updated in 2011. It's still out there, still claiming the "beautifulsoup" package name on pip, and it's tripping folks up when they try to install or use it under Python 3. But it's also still used in a lot of real projects, so I can't just yank it down.

I've decided to discontinue the 3.x series on January 1, 2021, one year after the sunset date for Python 2. Any project that uses Beautiful Soup 3 is already in trouble because of the Python 2 sunsetting, and this will give the developers an extra year to get everything sorted out. Porting to Beautiful Soup 4 should be a relatively easy part of a Python 3 migration.

Today I put out the 3.2.2 release of Beautiful Soup. This is the first 3.x release since 2012 and will hopefully be the final 3.x release. The only changes I made were to add a helpful error for anyone who tries to run the code under Python 3, and a deprecation warning for everybody else.

Discontinuing 3.x will free up the 'beautifulsoup' package name (whether on pip or in a Linux distribution) for a more recent version of Beautiful Soup. In the future, I plan to keep the pip package name as 'beautifulsoup' and let pip do the work of version management.

If you already use Beautiful Soup 4, you will be completely unaffected; hopefully you didn't even know about Beautiful Soup 3.

Leonard