[Python-Dev] The end of 2.7 (original) (raw)

Matthias Klose doko at ubuntu.com
Mon Apr 8 22:03:16 CEST 2013

Am 07.04.2013 20:02, schrieb Guido van Rossum:

But perhaps we could change the focus for 2.7 development a bit: instead of fixing bugs (or bickering about whether something is a bug fix or a new feature) we could limit changes to ensuring that it works on newer platforms. Martin mentioned that building 2.7 for Windows with the same toolchain that was used for the 2.7.0 release is getting more and more problematic. I'm not sure, but I could imagine similar problems for future versions of OS X and even Linux (though the Linux distributions typically take care of issues themselves).

I would like this new focus :-) Note that for 2.7.4 we did backport the bsddb module to build with recent db-5.x versions, the embedded libffi library to build on new platforms. I would like to see a backport for #17536 too, a change to support new web browsers in an updated runtime environment.

I would like to continue to backport cross build changes to 2.7.x, before all these people with Raspberry Pi's get too much annoyed about slow native builds.

Support for new targets should be allowed after a review.

There's not much of a point in fixing bugs that always existed in 2.7, since must 2.7 users are by now used to working around these. However, I do see a point in supporting builds targeting newer OS versions.

The upcoming Ubuntu 13.04 release uses mostly Python 3.3.1 for the desktop images, but still ships with Python 2.7.4 too on the images. For now most third party modules and extensions still have to be available for both versions. For now these binary packages (in the sense of a package in a Linux distribution) are built for Python 2 and 3 from the same source package, so keeping the build procedures and support about the same way helps with this approach.

Of course I can patch things locally, but would prefer to push these changes upstream. At the language summit I was surprised to hear about a common subset of backports for other vendor branches.

Matthias

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