Fw: [PROPOSAL] To retire autoconf for 4.1

[Simo]

On 05/24/2013 09:07 AM, 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.

It is not that simple. Samba now is in the business of providing 
bindings, that mean dependencies for other applications. It is very 
likely we'll have to build bindings for both 2.x and 3.x at the same 
time and make them parallel installable for a while. Otherwise it 
becomes a multipackage flag day where all of samba and all dependent 
packages need to switch at once.

>> 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.

Blame python developers, 2 -> 3 *will* be nasty and hard for a lot of 
projects, we are not alone.

> What are the long term releases we should be worried about a year from now that
> don't support Python3 yet? Debian oldstable and stable both have Python3, and
> all LTS releases of Ubuntu that are still supported also have a version of
> Python3.

No RHEL so far has Python 3, but see above, even if RHEL has python 3 it 
wouldn't make a big difference we would still wan to build with python 2 
due to the fact the samba bindings are now dependencies for other projects.

Simo.