On Dec 28, 2014, at 09:23 AM, Tanstaafl wrote:
Second, I (for one, but there are many other debian admins maintaining servers who feel the same) will not be upgrading my wheezy install to jessie due to the ongoing systemd debacle.
I *definitely* don't want to infect this list with a debate about systemd, but as I understand it, while systemd will be the default in Jessie, it will still be possibly to run it with other init systems.
Sticking to the issue at hand: whether we should try to support older Python 3 versions in order to support older Linux distro versions. The mechanics of setting up automated tests for those two versions is tricky, but I took a look at the test suite for the py3 branch against Python 3.3 and 3.2.
Python 3.3 is no problem; the test suite passes fully. This doesn't help for Wheezy though.
Python 3.2 is more problematic. There are quite a few things that aren't supported, some of which would be easy to fix (e.g. residual uses of u'' strings), some which could be compat'd around (e.g. missing unittest.mock library and contextlib.ExitStack classes), and some which are probably blockers. The biggest immediate problem seems to be that Falcon doesn't support Python 3.2. Its minimum requirement is 3.3.
But here's the thing: let's say you want to run MM3 on Wheezy, or some other Linux distro that doesn't have Python 3.4. It's unlikely that MM3 will be backported into those distro's backports channels, so you'll have to install it from some alternative location, like from source, a PPA, or an unofficial channel. The same probably goes for the newer versions of some MM3 dependencies. If you're going to install MM3 that way anyway, is it that much more effort to install Python 3.4 that way too?
Cheers, -Barry