On Thu, 2011-02-03 at 15:56 -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote: [...] > If necessary, we can solve the LTS upgrade problem similar to the way we > solved it for Lucid; we create an official PPA with Python 2.6 and port over > the stack required by services such as Launchpad. 3rd parties still requiring > Python 2.6, could create their own PPA, dependent on ours, and add whatever > packages they need to the former. > > Of course, we could also keep Python 2.6 and Python 2.7 until after 12.04. > > There seems to be lots of folks both for and against removal of Python 2.6. > It's worth discussion here, but we need to make a final decision for Natty by > feature freeze later this month.
I'm on the fence regarding this issue. On one hand I have few issues with removal of Python 2.6 from natty. On the other hand, there are good reasons to do that. I have two main issues with dropping Python 2.6 from natty, or with moving it to the official PPA. First, as there is no way to test all the python applications for the compatibility with 2.7, we are risking that we'll ship some broken software. It's not an issue for main, where there are many people looking at, and testing all the packages, but in the universe, or rather the "unseeded", world we may not catch all problems before the release. As Far as I Remember during the last transition there were bugs showing up on the LP even after the release, and the fastest and least-invasive way of fixing them was to force package to use Python 2.5. This time we'll have to actually investigate, and patch them all. It may yet again cause people to raise concerns about the quality of the software we are providing. From your experience with main, were there many issues with backward-incompatible changes in Python 2.7? The second issue is of a different matter - I just don't feel that we should bless PPAs as official, as long as there is no way to distinguish them from the "unofficial" ones in the Launchpad interface. They are called "personal" for a reason, and every time they are used for the official stuff, sanctioned by developers we are adding to the confusion. Damn, there is even a fine print on each PPA's page: "You can update your system with unsupported packages from this untrusted PPA". And if we say "hey, this PPA is actually supported by us" then how are users supposed to distinguish between "supported unsupported" PPAs and the "unsupported unsupported" PPAs. Poorly maintained PPAs are a source of many issues raised by out users. On the other hand, with the introduction of Unity 2D which is going to pull Qt, and few other libraries onto the CD, it does seem a little... "unsocial" to ship ~10MB of libraries because user may install Python 2.6 in the future.. 10MB equals one language pack, that would have to be dropped from the CD. If 11.04 were the LTS, I'd most likely be against dropping Python 2.6 from the archive, but I don't know if we can actually carry 2.6 all the way to the next LTS. We may end up having the same discussion in 6 months, when we run out of space on CD and can't cut anything else off. If it's the alternative then dropping 2.6 now leaves us with more time to work on any unexpected issues. Cheers, KK
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