[Python-Dev] PEP 11: Dropping support for ten year old systems (original) (raw)

David Malcolm dmalcolm at redhat.com
Mon Dec 6 23:55:03 CET 2010

On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 10:18 +0100, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

> EOL dates of prominent Linux distribution :

I think I would need more information than that. Nick's proposal was more specific: when does the vendor stop producing patches? This is a clear criterion, and one that I support. > RHEL: > https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/ My interpretation: Python support until end of production phase 3 (7 years).

(...)

So by this policy, RHEL and SuSE users would be off worse than with my original proposal (10 years).

Red Hat continues to provide patches for RHEL within the "Extended Life Cycle" (years 8, 9 and 10), but it's an optional add-on.

So another interpretation of the above with Nick's proposal could be 10 years on RHEL. (though obviously I'm biased in favor of RHEL)

Approaching this from another angle: please do add me to the "nosy" on any compatibility bugs with running latest python code on RHEL. I'm also looking into getting RHEL buildbot machines, FWIW.

> Considering the nature of the Fedora project, dropping unsupported fedora > distributions may or may not be helpful for Pyhton and it's users.

Again, for Linux, I think the issue is somewhat less critical: in terms of portability and ABI stability, it seems like they manage best (i.e. we have least version-dependent code for Linux in Python, probably because a "Linux version" doesn't exist in the first place, so distributions must provide source and binary compatibility even across vendors, making such support across versions more easy).

The other compat issues are in the toolchain: e.g. very recent versions of gcc . In downstream Fedora, we tend to be amongst the first to run into new compilation warnings (and, occasionally, "exciting" code-generation bugs...)

But this tends to be the opposite kind of problem: beginning of life, rather than end-of-life, and these sorts of things will need fixing for every Linux build eventually.

FWIW, I'm trying to keep Fedora's "system" python 2 and python 3 builds as up-to-date as reasonable, so Fedora users will (I hope) be running fairly recent code python as is. We have 2.7 as /usr/bin/python as of F14, for instance.

Hope this is helpful Dave

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