waf 1.8 and minimum python versions

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Sat, 2015-03-07 at 20:35 +0100, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> On 07/03/15 20:28, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> > On Sat, 2015-03-07 at 15:42 +0100, Thomas Nagy wrote:
> >> On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> >>> On Mon, 2015-02-02 at 21:11 +0100, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> >>>> Hi!
> >>>>
> >>>> Review&push appreciated!
> >>>>
> >>>> Thanks,
> >>>>
> >>>> Volker
> >>> Volker,
> >>>
> >>> With current master, I can't build on OpenBSD.  I get
> >>> /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lsmbconf
> >>> collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
> >>> Waf: Leaving directory `/home/abartlet/samba/bin'
> >>> Build failed:  -> task failed (err #1):
> >>>         {task: cc_link version_test_213.o -> versiontest}
> >>> *** Error 1 in /home/abartlet/samba (Makefile:8 'all')
> >>>
> >>> Is that the error you got when you built with this fix, or is this
> >>> something else?
> >>>
> >>> (My background here is that I've been asked to review the patch to
> >>> migrate us to waf 1.8, and I certainly wouldn't want to be party to a
> >>> regression in this area)
> >>>
> >> Regarding the waf 1.8 transition, the patches in question are attached
> >> to this message; their goal is to have the wscript files unmodified
> >> when performing changes on the wafsamba and waf files. Tracking
> >> changes will be much easier without having to constantly merge the
> >> wscript files. The other changes from the waf 1.5 repository are bug
> >> fixes that convey no significant benefits for Samba; they can be
> >> excluded for the time being.
> >>
> >> I wrote a proof of concept for building samba with Python 3, but there
> >> are a few questions regarding the wafsamba files. Since the waf 1.8
> >> files are written in Python 2.7-3.x syntax, the waf library typically
> >> unpacks and modifies itself in order to support Python 2.5 and 2.6.
> >> Since the Samba build relies on python files in the wafsamba folder,
> >> these files will need to be updated to the Python 3 exception handling
> >> syntax. There is therefore a decision to make on the minimum Python
> >> version supported:
> >> A. Python 2.6 may become the minimum supported version for building Samba.
> > Python 2.6 is our minimum, currently, as that is what EPEL has in RHEL5.
> >
> > I'm open to bumping it to 2.7, as RHEL5 becomes older, if we have a good
> > reason.
> 
> Where do we set that policy exactly ? :-) The top-level wscript
> directory checks for python 2.5.

I think we occasionally write e-mails to the list here about removing
hacks to support earlier python versions, and take the almost total lack
of comment as consent :-)

Python 2.6 was requested by metze in Jan 2015 for python-pexpect.

I agree bumping the explicit check would be much more productive, and it
looks like we did that when we moved the minimum to 2.5. 

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          http://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba