Fw: [PROPOSAL] To retire autoconf for 4.1

[Volker Lendecke]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 03:07:33PM +0200, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 08:30:10AM -0400, Simo wrote:
> > On 05/24/2013 07:58 AM, yaberger at ca.ibm.com wrote:
> > >http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3
> > >
> > >I believe you're right, ie: when most major distributions will provide a
> > >Python 3.x package in their repositories, Samba team should start working
> > >on moving from Python 2.x to 3.x for Samba and Waf.
> > >RHEL 6.4 is on 2.6.6
> > >Debian 7 is on 2.7.3 but also have a package for Python 3.2.3
> > 
> > At SambaXP I and Alexander started raising a concern about this.
> > Fedora is starting to plan to move to Python 3, so we need to start
> > thinking about moving samba as well.
> When will Fedora drop support for Python 2.x? Just having the default changed
> shouldn't be a problem, so long as Python2.x is still installable.
> 
> > Unfortunately we cannot just make a full switch. Because there are
> > distributions that will stay on Python 2.x for a long time, much
> > longer than Fedora's support for Python 2.x presumably.
> > 
> > So we should really look into what it will take to try to support
> > both 2.x and 3.x especially for generated bindings as the binding
> > interface, I am told, changes quite some fundamental things.
> > 
> > A flag day where we switch fro 2 to 3 is highly unfeasible unless we
> > also decide to drop support for all Enterprise Linux distributions
> > and all other long term maintenance Unix flavors at the same time. I
> > do not think that would be a wise choice.
> I've tried to do support for both python2 and python3 with a few projects. It
> requires ugly hacks that make the code less readable, is a major pain to keep
> up and prone to regressions even for smaller projects. It would be
> a nightmare for a project the size of Samba.

This means that Python 3 is just a different language. If
Fedora drops support for Python 2 it is almost the same as
if they drop support for C/C++ given the enormous popularity
of Python 2.

If Fedora drops support for Python 2, why should we bother?
If Fedora drops support for C, Samba would not switch to Ada
or Haskell, right? We would just say that Fedora should
really wake up and continue supporting us.

Yes, I know this is vastly exagerrated, but if Fedora wants
to drop supporting our infrastructure, it is up to them to
provide patches to upstream, right?

Volker

P.S: By the way, with configure/make we would not have this
discussion, right?

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