They do -- it's trivial to have python2 installed on the same system as python3. The deal with RHEL is that they will no longer include python2 packages at all.

That isn't really to say that somebody else won't make packages.

Thank you, that's much more clear. So RHEL is deprecating their python2 package i.e. declaring their intent to eventually remove it.

For some reason "replaces X with Y" suggests to me that they swapped one for the other (e.g. /usr/bin/python) which seems error-prone.

There are things included in RHEL which use Python. These will now use Python3 instead of Python2, so from that perspective it has been replaced.

RHEL's system tools like yum use python2 today, but in the next release will rely on python3.

>The deal with RHEL is that they will no longer include python2 packages at all.

Generally, if you are installing your own application you will use a virtualenv with all the packages closed off from the base operating system and dependencies installed with pip (we're all doing this, right folks!?).

You can write code that runs with both python3 and python2. Therefore I wouldn't call them different languages.

By that logic, C and C++ shouldn't be called different languages.

To a certain extent, they aren't.

The same compilers and tools are used for both, many developers mix the two in one codebase, and use small features from C++ in "C programs" because the compiler allows them to. For example before recent C standards, function overloading by argument types or declaring variables in the middle of a function.

But Python2 and Python3 are way more similar than C and C++.

They share a special relationship, don't they? The difference to Python is though, that you're restricting yourself A LOT more when writing C and C++ compatible code (you're basically writing C with a few exceptions).