How to debug on a Python 2 project?

[OmeGak]

The 2022.4.0 release updated the debugpy version to v1.6.0, which drops support for Python 2. I know it's crazy that some projects haven't moved to Python 3 yet but, unfortunately, I will still need to deal with a project in Python 2 for a few more months.

Do we, poor souls like me, have any way to run a debugger session with an older version of debugpy? I've tried reverting these changes locally to run the 1.5.1 version of debugpy without luck. I must be missing something, as vscode-python keeps running the latest version of debugpy and doesn't try to install v1.5.1.

Any help or idea to workaround this mess will be much appreciated. 🙏

[OmeGak]

Installing the v2022.2.1924087327 version of vscode-python from "Install Another Version..." on the extension sidebar menu did the job for now.

[lovette]

Oh my gosh, I'm so glad I found your answer! I'm actively trying to migrate from 2.7 too and lack of a debugger isn't going to help...

Any idea if it's possible to pin the version in a "settings.json" so my PY2 containers don't default to loading the new extension?

[brettcannon]

You can specify extensions in your devcontainer.json file, but there isn't a way to specify a specific version. For that you would need to open a feature request at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-remote-release/issues .

[OmeGak]

I haven't used dev containers, but this seems a promising lead (although with caveats): microsoft/vscode-remote-release#3253.

[brettcannon]

You could do a remote connection to a running process that's using an older version of debugpy. See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/debugging for instructions on how to do that. You would want to use https://pypi.org/project/debugpy/1.5.1/ on the remote side as that's the last debugpy version with Python 2 support.

And I do want to acknowledge we understand that unfortunately not everyone is off of Python 2 yet. But in order to fix some long-standing bugs in debugpy, that team needed to be able to move on beyond Python 2 and over 2 years passed upstream EOL was about as long as the team could stand to hold out.

[OmeGak]

Thanks for this other alternative, @brettcannon. I would also like to acknowledge that I find 2 years after EOL a more than reasonable timeframe for projects to drop support for Python 2 without looking back. It's ultimately on us few who are still struggling with a Python 2 project to come out alive from it.