> On Aug 24, 2016, at 3:49 PM, Andrew Wang <[email protected]> wrote:
> My reasoning here has been that this tool will primarily be run by release
> managers, and RMs are very likely to have Python 2.7 on their machine.
Whereas I believe the opposite: there's a good chance if one is the RM
for enterprise software, the machine you are building on probably doesn't have
python 2.7 on it because you aren't doing this work on your desktop! It's
extremely common to have build servers that are several OS revs behind because
software tends to be more upwardly compatible....
> ASF infra and servers in general are not really a target.
Umm, yeah, they kind of are. While there are certainly issues with
them, they do serve as sort of a model of what is out in the real world. It's
old and crufty and that's how a lot of software is built. Where people build
software is *exactly* our target.
Here's a fun anecdote. Firefox v48 is the first version to drop
support for Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8. This means they were almost
certainly building on 10.6. So up until earlier this year, they were using a 7
year old OS that most definitely didn't have python 2.7 on it by default.
Mozilla, by many accounts, would be considered quite aggressive but they can
get away with it because they are targeting the desktop.
> Maybe one day if
> we want to run this as part of precommit, but then it can be optional like
> gradle and docker.
It sends really bizarre mixed messages if one tool has different python
requirements than another just because someone wanted to use a different option
parsing library.
