[Python-Dev] Supported versions of OpenSSL (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Aug 29 22:59:08 EDT 2016

On 30 August 2016 at 08:56, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Aug 29, 2016, at 12:33 PM, Cory Benfield wrote:

Can someone explain to me why this is a use-case we care about? I do think it would be nice to be able to compile newer versions of Python on stock LTS releases, especially for people developing software that they want to support on a wide-range of Python 3 versions.

Based on this discussion, I've been thinking about how we could articulate these build support constraints in PEP 11, similar to the https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0011/#microsoft-windows section we have for Windows.

For that, I think it makes sense to key off source compatibility with the most recent releases of long term community or commercially supported Linux distros that have folks directly involved in CPython development (specifically Debian stable, Ubuntu LTS, and RHEL/CentOS).

The other thing I've been looking at is how well documented the process is for building with a custom OpenSSL instead of the system one, and as near as I can tell, it isn't documented at all - the top level README doesn't mention it, and because the compilation is handled by setup.py rather than directly by make, there's no configure option for it the way there is for "--with-system-expat", "--with-system-libmpdec" and "--with-system-ffi".

By contrast (and assuming I understand the situation correctly), the Windows build is already set up around the assumption that you'll need to build OpenSSL yourself.

So, in addition to updating PEP 11 with guidelines for determining the OpenSSL constraints for each release, I think we'll also need a README update to cover building against a non-system OpenSSL.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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