Open Stack

On Tue, 2012-11-27 at 10:52 +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > Never say never. Honestly, if someone showed up with fairly well
> > advanced support for Python 3.x and that meant we absolutely had to drop
> > Python 2.6 support, I'd be the first to say we should do it.
> > 
> > If that happened, Red Hat (and others) would have to just suck it up and
> > maintain patches for 2.6 support. I'd think we (as a project) would
> > provide whatever assistance is reasonable, though.
> 
> I'd really prefer if we could have a clear house rule, rather than a set
> of ad-hoc decisions that nobody can anticipate. That doesn't mean we
> can't have exceptions to the rule in really odd corner cases (say, if
> RHEL decides the next version will actually be in 2025). But, in absence
> of exceptions, everyone should know what the default rule is.

The clear house rule is "we support latest RHEL" but we can anticipate
an exception to that.

We don't want to discourage people from working on Python 3 support now
nor do we want to give the impression that we'll ditch 2.6 support the
day RHEL7 comes out. Neither makes any sense.

The reality isn't hard to explain:

  The project has two apparently conflicting goals - supporting 
  RHEL6-era distros (i.e. Python 2.6) and adopting Python 3 support
  ASAP. In the absence of a group of developers making determined 
  efforts to bring us closer to Python 3 support and being hampered by
  the requirement to support Python 2.6, we will continue to support
  Python 2.6.

Cheers,
Mark.