[python-committers] [Python-Dev] 3.7.2rc1 and 3.6.8rc1 cutoffs ahead, last 3.6.x bugfix release!

[Petr Viktorin]

On 12/23/18 2:08 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> On Thu., 20 Dec. 2018, 3:46 am Brett Cannon <brett at python.org 
> <mailto:brett at python.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>     On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 at 06:01, Victor Stinner <vstinner at redhat.com
>     <mailto:vstinner at redhat.com>> wrote:
> 
> 
>         For example, supporting a version means to
>         have a working CI (Travis CI, AppVeyor, VSTS, buildbots). I would
>         suggest to only support a very few platforms for the LTS. I
>         propose to
>         restrict to Linux. It doesn't mean to break other platforms on
>         purpose, just to restrict CI to the bare minimum. If Microsoft is
>         interested, we can also support Windows as well.
> 
> 
>     But that doesn't help someone like me who isn't working on Linux, so
>     it's still work to support just Linux compared to Windows or macOS.
>     Plus supporting just Linux in CI and such is still not free either.
> 
> 
>         RHEL 7 is based on Python 2.7.5 which has been released in 2013 (5
>         years ago) and there are 150 patches on top of it: it means that
>         around 30 patches are added per year. I would suggest to have a very
>         strict policy on which changes are backported into 3.6: only the
>         most
>         critical bugfixes, but all security fixes obviously.
> 
>         If we extend Python 3.6 lifetime, do we need a new release manager
>         when the initial lifetime (usually 5 years) ends? Benjamin Peterson
>         accepted to be the Python 2.7 release manager for 10 years
>         (instead of
>         5 years initially). We could ask Ned Deily about Python 3.6 LTS
>         :-) We
>         would need a group of people reviewing individual 3.6 pull
>         requests to
>         decide to pick them or not. I would volunteer to review these
>         PRs and
>         merge them.
> 
>         The idea isn't new, Nick Coghlan proposed a "ELPython" last year:
> 
>         https://github.com/elpython/elpython-meta
> 
> 
>     Was that when
> 
> 
> If the unfinished question there is "... when Nick was still working for 
> Red Hat?", then yeah, it was.
> 
> I knew RHEL 8 was coming with Py3.6 as the system Python, and wanted a 
> way to avoid the anchoring effects that Alex Gaynor and I talked about a 
> few years back in 
> https://alexgaynor.net/2015/mar/30/red-hat-open-source-community/ and 
> https://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2015/04/stop-supporting-python26.html
> 
> I still think ELPython is a good idea, as it should solve a bunch of the 
> problems that Alex raised on the community side, while also helping 
> commercial distributors (including Red Hat) provide the explicitly in 
> demand commercial service of compatible *feature* backports to LTS 
> releases (go look at the system Python 2.6 install in RHEL 6, for 
> example - it includes a number of 2.7 features, such as 
> collections.OrderedDict).
> 
> Red Hat's provided that service for years for their Linux kernels, and 
> it's one of the capabilities that their customers most value.
> 
> The community benefit of allowing such backports to take place in a 
> cross-vendor collaborative project is that it would allow popular 
> backwards compatible features to be adopted by library authors more 
> quickly, as they'd have the option of switching to relying on the EL 
> variant of a release for a feature they wanted, rather than having to 
> drop that release stream entirely.
> 
> However, I also deliberately designed the proposal to make it clear it 
> was only going to happen as a *paid* activity, with a bright line for 
> contributions where the only reason for a volunteer to take their change 
> across that line would be because they wanted the new behaviour in the 
> EL version themselves.
> 
> Thus the notion of a separate GitHub org, source-only releases, 
> different runtime identification metadata, etc.
> 
> Actually pursuing that project would still need a PEP to spell out the 
> relationship between CPython and the ELPython derivative, though.
> 
> Pursuing the project would also need credible commitments from 
> redistributors to actually adopt the variant - the technical design in 
> the README is explicitly constructed so it would work as a drop-in 
> replacement for the RHEL 8 system Python, but at the time I left RH, 
> Petr Viktorin and I didn't have agreement from management yet that that 
> was a path the company wanted to go down (and it was only recently, when 
> the RHEL 8 public beta dropped, that we gained the ability to discuss 
> the commercial motivation for the idea with the upstream community).

(with my RH hat on; despite my personal address:)

If anyone wants to collaborate, I'd be happy go push the EL Python idea 
further. But, so far, we haven't found other organizations that would 
want to join the effort. (BTW, I think Victor asking CPython devs 
themselves was a very long shot, but at least it confirmed that the 
answer is "no".)

So it looks like we'll keep the status quo – Red Hat's patches to 3.6 
will be available in Red Hat & CentOS repos.