Open Stack

On 12-11-26 11:40 AM, Monty Taylor wrote:
> Hey all!
>
> I started a discussion during a TC meeting a little while ago that 
> needs more general input and feedback. The question at hand is "what 
> versions of python and what versions of what distros do we care about 
> as a project?"
>

Thanks for doing this.

> First of all, this isn't a discussion about what CI will test or what 
> we'll use for gating.  It's more of a conversation about what language 
> and OS assumptions developers can make when they are writing code, so 
> that design and review choices can be made.
>
> To put it more bluntly, if someone files a bug or a code review 
> comment that says:
>
> "Blah doesn't work in python X"
>
> When can we respond "not a bug/won't fix" with a clear conscience?
>
> When we first started the project, we said out loud that development 
> was always focused on the current release of Ubuntu and that's it. We 
> picked that because doing _development_ targeting a bazillion distro 
> options at the same time gets hairy quickly, and I think the clarity 
> served has us well. But I'm pretty sure things have changed since then 
> - latest Ubuntu does not come with python 2.6, for instance, but we 
> still seem to care about it.

Thats right, if someone wanted to use python 2.6 on Ubuntu then there is 
plenty of documentation on how to do it. However, its not something we 
would support by default.

>
> With that background, I'd like to start things off by proposing the 
> following:
>
> a) We continue to focus development efforts of master on the latest 
> release of Ubuntu with python libraries coming from PyPI.
> b) We don't introduce things into master that would be unworkable on 
> either latest Ubuntu LTS or latest RHEL.

Great
>
> Logistically, because of our development focus on pypi modules in 
> virtualenvs, this doesn't affect much for developers outside of base 
> python versions and a few things that can't go in a virtualenv like 
> libvirt or the kernel. Since RedHat and Canonical have both committed 
> to maintaining special backport repos for those things for users of 
> RHEL and Ubuntu LTS, I don't think in practice it's going to have much 
> of a noticeable impact.

If we need a newer version of something we have been backporting it via 
the cloud archive.
>
> Except where it comes to base python versions.
>
> If we take the above to be correct, it has the following effect:
>
> - We need to care about python 2.6 compatibility until such a time as 
> there is a RHEL that has 2.7 in it.
> - 2.7 should be our current dev focus, so if possible we should code 
> to 2.7 libs and then use backport packages like unittest2 to make 2.6 
> happy.
> - We can't REALLY start thinking about Python3 in earnest until a RHEL 
> release comes out with python 2.7, because 2.7/3.3 are needed for 
> source-code compatible code
>
With regards to python 3.3 support in Openstack, I can see the next LTS 
release of Ubuntu to be python 3.3 by default. So it is something that 
is definitely on our radar and we will probably advocating for down the 
road.

> Net result - pretty much exactly what we're doing today, it just gets 
> it down on paper a little better.
>
> Thoughts? Disagreements?
>
> Monty
>
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