RHEL6 blocking Python 2.7 and 3.x

Simo simo at samba.org
Fri Sep 4 01:10:32 UTC 2015


On Fri, 2015-09-04 at 07:35 +1200, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-09-02 at 18:24 -0400, Simo wrote:
> > On Thu, 2015-09-03 at 09:37 +1200, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2015-09-02 at 09:50 +0200, Lukas Slebodnik wrote:
> > > > On (02/09/15 09:56), Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> > > > > On Tue, 2015-09-01 at 20:04 +0200, Matthias Dieter Wallnöfer
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > > > Hi Andrew,
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > it is CentOS 5 which uses this older GNUTLS release
> > > > > > (1.4.1).
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Well I do not complain if we are not supporting it any
> > > > > > longer
> > > > > > but > > > 
> > > > > > then
> > > > > > we should change our WAF checks to exclude it.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Matthias
> > > > > 
> > > > > Can you prepare such a patch.  If accepted this may also give
> > > > > us 
> > > > > the
> > > > > excuse to move to Python 2.7 as a minimum as well (presuming
> > > > > that
> > > > > doesn't cause other problems).
> > > > > 
> > > > CentOS 6 has just Python 2.6
> > > > So some users might complain they are not able to build samba
> > > > on 
> > > > CentOS 6.
> > > 
> > > This will indeed be a major impediment to our move to Python3.  
> > > 
> > > Ouch.
> > > 
> > > Andrew Bartlett
> > 
> > This was clear and obvious.
> > Samba has no option but to support both python2 and python3 for a t
> > lest a few years. You can't just make a clean cut and switch, it
> > simply
> > is not going to work for at least half of the users.
> > 
> > distributions also need to be able to provide modules for both
> > python2
> > and python3 at the same time, or it will be really hard to make any
> > transition with the wide set of interlocked dependencies.
> 
> What was implicit, but not stated in my frustration here is that I've
> been told that in general, making python code compatible with Python3
> first requires that Python 2.7 be the minimum version.  Thankfully
> the
> current proposals to fix up the C API don't require this, but the
> effort will need to turn to the Python Python soon.
> 
> I've always assumed (and argued) that our users would only accept
> Samba
> depending on software in base RHEL or at most EPEL, but to test the
> counter-point: Are software collections[1] suitable for Samba to
> depend
> on for Python[2] purposes?
> 
> Note that we already depend on EPEL for Python on RHEL 5 (as the
> system
> python is very, very old), and there were no complaints. 

I think it will be ok soon, RHEL6 (and CentOS6) is still very widely
used, but people are moving to RHEL7, so I think we'll be able to start
requiring 2.7 relatively soon. I would give it one more year if at all
possible (talking about last officially supported samba release, not
development), and then drop support for 2.6 and stay on 2.7 going
forward.

Simo.

> Thanks,
> 
> Andrew Bartlett
> 
> [1] https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/
> [2] https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/python27/




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