Drop RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 support and move to Python 3.8 minimum?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Mon, 2023-08-21 at 08:48 +0300, Pavel Kalugin via samba-technical
wrote:
> On 8/19/23 21:06, Andreas Schneider via samba-technical wrote:
> > On Friday, 18 August 2023 02:08:00 CEST Andrew Bartlett via samba-
> > technical
> > wrote:
> > > I would note that times when we didn't line up the CI version and
> > > Python 'supported' version, it kept breaking.
> > > I note that RHEL7 ends 'maintenance' in June 2024, just after the
> > > 4.20
> > > release March 2024
> > > https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/end-maintenance-red-hat-enterprise-linux-7-al
> > > 
> > > most-here Those dates I think give good cause to drop CentOS 7,
> > > but other
> > > views still welcome.
> > 
> > I'm fine with dropping Python 3.6 support for Samba 4.20.
> 
> How will this affect OpenSUSE Leap users, where official python3 is 
> still python3.6?

This https://news.opensuse.org/2023/06/06/leap-modern-python-stack/
suggests that there is a python311 to install and the packages we need would be built for Python 3.11

Sadly that does not seem to be the case: 

sudo zypper --non-interactive install python311   python311-
Markdown     python311-cryptography     python311-devel     python311-
dnspython     python311-gpg     python311-
policycoreutils     python311-pyasn1     python311-python-
dateutil     python311-requests     python311-semanage     python311-
setproctitle
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Package 'python311-Markdown' not found.
Package 'python311-cryptography' not found.
Package 'python311-dnspython' not found.
Package 'python311-gpg' not found.
Package 'python311-policycoreutils' not found.
Package 'python311-pyasn1' not found.
Package 'python311-python-dateutil' not found.
Package 'python311-requests' not found.
Package 'python311-semanage' not found.
Package 'python311-setproctitle' not found.


This is much more troubling than the few (but critical) missing packages on CentOS 8 Stream:

https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/merge_requests/3231

So, and I am being over-dramatic here, this may be a case of Python 3.6 forever: as two major distributions blocking the upgrade.  

(I would naturally appreciate assistance in finding a solution here).

This is unfortunate.

Andrew,

-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him)       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Samba Team Member (since 2001) https://samba.org
Samba Team Lead                https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba
Catalyst.Net Ltd

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