[Python-Dev] PEP 11: Dropping support for ten year old systems

[David Malcolm]

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