Re: [Qemu-devel] Deprecation policy and build dependencies

[John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>]

On 6/3/19 2:27 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 19:21, John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> wrote:
>> I get it, we don't want to require Python 3.8 because some dev wanted
>> assignment conditionals -- but we're talking about Python 2 here, which
>> suffers its EOL by the end of this calendar year.
>>
>> So do we think it's reasonable to drop support for Python2 for the
>> release that comes out after Python2's EOL, or do we insist on 2x3
>> simultaneous support for years more?
> 
> I don't have a strong opinion on Python in particular, but
> I think it would be nicer to avoid the "python is a special
> snowflake" effect. Would it really be so bad for it to just
> be "drop it when it falls off the last LTS distro" like the
> rest of our dependencies ?
> 
> thanks
> -- PMM
> 

When it comes to supporting both 2 and 3 simultaneously yes; it's in my
opinion not trivial to maintain a growing testing and utility
infrastructure that works in versions as disparate as 2.7 and 3.7 from
RHEL7 all the way to Fedora 30. It's not going to get easier, either.
(Especially not after EOL.)

For comparison, at least when we target different versions of compilers,
we are at least targeting the same version of the language...

If you are running a stable or outdated distro and you want to build
bleeding edge QEMU and you cannot somehow find out how to get Python3 on
your machine after the official EOL of python2, I am not sure that
should become the developer's burden. I don't think we are being too
unreasonably avant-garde about adopting technologies that are too new.

--js