I'd like to share some updates about this. New release of the whereto library (0.5.0) was created and now pulled into CI after requirements update. I've proposed some patches to replace pcre(3) accordingly[1]. Interestingly doc jobs are still passing due to available wheels (bindings are not built during installation), but it would be really nice if we can merge these ASAP so that we won't hit the problem caused by these obsolete packages when we have to migrate doc jobs to newer ubuntu in the future. [1] https://review.opendev.org/q/topic:%22pcre%22 Patches currently needing reviews are; https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/cinder/+/970064 https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/glance/+/970065 On 12/8/25 11:48 PM, Takashi Kajinami wrote:
Hi !
I'm sending this email so that you'd be aware of an upcoming breaking change in the whereto library, because you might need to update your projects (especially their bindep.txt files) to adopt your projects to the change.
The whereto library is a tiny library to generate redirect rules in Apache and has been used in documentation build in several projects. This library has been dependent on python-pcre, which requires the following packages.
- libpcre3-dev in Debian-based operating systems (such as Debian or Ubuntu) - pcre-devel in RHEL-based operating systems (such as RHEL or CentOS Stream)
However these packages are no longer provided by newer operating systems and we have to replace these by PCRE 2.
- Debian removed libpcre3-dev because PCRE 3 is obsolete and it is recommended to replace it by PCRE 2 [1].
- RHEL 10 removed PCRE and PCRE 2 is a recommended replacement.
I've already proposed the change[1] of whereto to replace python-pcre by pcre2 (which requires pcre2 packages from OS). I'll create a new release of whereto shortly after this change is merged.
Once the new release hits the upper constraints, libpcre3-dev and pcre-devel in bindep.txt in each repository should be replaced. See [3] to learn how the change should look like. So far I'm planning to take care of this transition, but it'd be nice if I can ask for some attention about it.
Please let me know if you have any question.
Thank you, Takashi
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2021/11/msg00176.html [2] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/whereto/+/970061 [3] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/whereto/+/970061/4/bindep.txt