Fw: [PROPOSAL] To retire autoconf for 4.1

Jelmer Vernooij jelmer at samba.org
Fri May 24 09:59:44 MDT 2013


On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 05:40:14PM +0200, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 03:55:24PM +0200, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > It is to some degree a different language. Python 3 is better in a lot of ways, but 
> > I'm not a fan of the way the transition from 2.x to 3.0 was managed - and it shows
> > in the number of packages that have migrated to 3.0. Unfortunately there's not
> > much we can do about that now.
> 
> For that exact reason I don't believe that Python 2 will die
> in any foreseeable time frame. Eventually someone might step
> up and do a separate and parallel Python 3 implementation of
> the bindings, but that should not affect the existing Samba
> binding code. As I said -- it's the same as if someone
> started to do bindings for Google go, Ruby or PHP.
There are some big differences but they are still fundamentally the same
language. Migrating from Python 2 to Python 3 is nowhere as much work as
writing new bindings for another language.

> Do you see the pattern here? This whole thread started
> because the burden to support 2 build systems seems too high
> for some developers. By choosing Python and not some fully
> embeddable, shippable language like Lua or ECMAscript we
> deliberately and knowingly chose to accept the very same
> problem again.
I don't see how they are any different. Lua and ECMAscript are also evolving.
If we used Lua there would be people wanting to call Samba libraries from their
lua scripts, so we'd have to worry about supporting whatever version of lua
they are using. Nobody is forcing us to move away from Python 2.

> > If Fedora were to consider dropping Python2.x support while there was still
> > a large number of packages relying on it, I don't see why they wouldn't
> > consider to do the same with m4 or autoconf. Neither seems realistic.
> So -- there's no point in worrying about Python 3.
Unless we want to. It will probably make sense at some point.

Cheers,

Jelmer


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