Open Stack

Hey all!

This morning, we experienced our first systemic breakage of the gate of
2014! There are a few reasons for this, which are related to pip and
virtualenv making new releases. The new releases do WONDERFUL things and
are more secure, but unfortunately, we've hit a few pain points which we
are working through.

The most visible one that's going to come across people's plate has to
do with mysql-python. The upstream package still hasn't updated itself
from attempting to explicitly use distribute, and it cannot be installed
by pip 1.5. (this has nothing to do with OpenStack - mysql-python is
simply uninstallable with pip 1.5 at the moment)

Since we kinda use the heck out of mysql-python, and we're also pretty
heavy users of pip, we have to address the situation.

First of all, we made a pull request to upstream:

 https://github.com/farcepest/MySQLdb1/pull/44

That fixes the issue. In a perfect world, this will get merged and 1.2.5
will get released in the next 30 minutes. However, there is another pull
request that is 3 months old that also addresses this issue, so we're
having to make contingency plans in case it does not get addressed.

The most immediate plan is that we've prepared a lightweight fork based
on the above patches, called it python-MySQLdb, and uploaded it to PyPI.
The only things changed in the fork are the packaging changes needed to
get things working with modern pip. We'll be making patches to move
requirements to consume that for the time being. As it's the same code
as mysql-python, distros should not need to care about this fork, and we
fully intend to delete it the instant upstream is fixed. (to be fair, by
"delete" we probably mean "upload an empty package which depends on
mysql-python")

We're not happy about this, but we also don't want the gate to be broken
- or for local dev envs to be broken - for a significant period of time.

Thanks!
Monty