Open Stack

On Tue, 2012-11-27 at 12:52 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 11:28:07PM +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > 
> > > b) We don't introduce things into master that would be unworkable on 
> > > either latest Ubuntu LTS or latest RHEL.
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> I'm of the opposite opinion really. There may be nice things in Python
> 3.x, but when it actually comes down to it, the choice of 2.x vs 3.x
> has little-to-no bearing on what features OpenStack supports, what
> its user experience is, and what its deployment model is. What does make
> a negative experiance as a person deploying / using OpenStack, is finding
> out that your platform is too old and being forced to upgrade, or more
> likely switch to an alternative cloud technology which does support your
> current platform. IMHO, supporting Python 3.x adds little, and if it means
> dropping 2.6 support, it could be considered actively harmful overall.
> 
> Meanwhile there are plenty of things we could be doing to improve the
> quality / scalability / ease of deployment for OpenStack that are
> relevant to both 2.x and 3.x and would have much more significant
> benefit for end users / deployers / vendors. eg switch to use a real
> OS threading system so we can actually utilization large SMP hosts
> effectively

Mostly agree with all that, but the way I see the Python 3 issue is that
Python 2 is eventually going to go away and we're going to need multiple
release cycles of determined effort to be prepared for that.

If there was a group showing that they are prepared to put in that
determined effort, I'd prefer to support them rather than block that
progress.

If and when that time comes, though, I'd expect another group to be
prepared to put in a determined effort to maintain 2.6 support (somehow)
alongside the 3.x support. Those two groups would have to just muddle
through somehow, perhaps not sharing the same branch.

My point is pretty simple - no-one should feel that there are rules or
mandates that prevents them getting starting on 3.x support.

Cheers,
Mark.