While I definitely appreciate your position, Allen, I agree with Andrew here. As much as I love Bash (just ask my frustrated colleagues...), Python really makes life significantly easier when it comes to maintainable scripts, 2.7 in particular. The example over in YETUS-445 specifically pointed to argparse; it's not fun to write command line parsers with inferior functionality and readability to maintain support for a 10 year old interpreter. I worry that we'll close the door on a lot of useful contributions if we maintain this as a requirement.
On Wednesday, August 24, 2016, Allen Wittenauer <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Aug 24, 2016, at 12:21 PM, Andrew Wang <[email protected] > <javascript:;>> wrote: > > > > Hi dev@, > > > > This topic came up on YETUS-445. I'd like to make the case for requiring > > Python 2.7. > > > > As a bit of background, the main offender here is RHEL6. RHEL7 has been > out > > for two years and has some penetration, but RHEL6 is still out there and > > supported. > > I think I know of maybe two sizable shops that are using RHEL7. > Everyone else is either still on RHEL6 or derivatives. (FWIW: mainly due > to systemd. One company I know of has gone so far to avoid systemd that > they forked from CentOS 6 and are now building their own distributions.) > > That also doesn't cover other operating systems... I think > Solaris 10 shipped with python 2.6 and it's still very much supported by > Oracle. It also happens to be what the ASF Solaris boxes are running... I > think AIX is in a similar situation. > > > My take on it: > > > > * This tool is aimed at release managers, and no one runs RHEL6 on their > > personal dev machine. > > *looks at VM running CentOS 6 where he tested the release of Yetus > as the RM and other bits before* > > > * Even for build machines, Docker is not supported on RHEL6 ( > > https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1378023). FWIW, Docker is a > requirement > > for building a Hadoop release and used by Hadoop precommit. > > That doesn't really matter much. ASF and Hadoop != rest of > universe. We're trying to build something usable by lots of folks here... > > > * If you really do need to use RHEL6, you can use conda ( > > http://conda.pydata.org/miniconda.html) to install Python 2.7 quite > easily. > > I've used it, and it's great. > > > > Thoughts? > > The only thing I'm convinced of is that python is still horribly > designed. :) We should rewrite it all in perl5. :) > > > -- -Dima
