Open Stack

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 11:19 AM, Ben Nemec <openstack at nemebean.com> wrote:
>
> I have to admit I don't entirely understand this constraint.  CentOS 7 is in
> support until 2024.  I would think RHEL 7's timeline is similar or even
> longer.  If Python 2 is going out of support in 2020, does that mean there
> will be no supported Python on CentOS for the last four years of its
> lifecycle?

The OpenStack community is definitely not expected to support py2 beyond
2020. If RHEL and CentOS wants to support py2 beyond that date, the burden
is on them.

The RHEL 8 release date is unknown. We can only speculate that it should
be "sometime soon" based on previous release dates [1].

I don't know if it's going to be an official goal to drop py27 support in
OpenStack for Rocky but we can't wait at the last minute -- py3 support has
been a goal for a long time [2].

It doesn't mean that RDO has to support a python2 version of OpenStack
on EL7 after upstream has dropped support for it.
It's similar to how EL6 support was eventually dropped after moving on from
py26 (or was it py25?) and we started shipping on EL7.

> In fact, the more I think about this the more I feel like there's a
> fundamental problem with the way we're handling this transition.  We're not
> the only ones who are going to feel the pain of having disjoint Python
> releases from 7 to 8.  Anyone running a Python application now gets to not
> only do a major OS upgrade, but also a major Python upgrade.  Sure, it's
> worse for us because we need to support EL 8 at release, but _everyone_ is
> going to feel some variation on this pain as they move forward.

Python 3 has been out since 2008 [3], yup, 10 years ago.. and here we are.
I remember when most of this board was red [4].

> I realize this is a discussion that's probably above my pay grade, but I
> feel I would be remiss if I didn't point out that our Python support
> strategy seems very flawed.

It's no use questioning the decisions that lead RHEL7 to ship without py3
in 2014, we can only look forward at this point :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Version_history
[2]: https://governance.openstack.org/tc/goals/pike/python35.html
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Version_3
[4]: https://python3wos.appspot.com/

David Moreau Simard
Senior Software Engineer | OpenStack RDO

dmsimard = [irc, github, twitter]