Peter Maydell <peter.mayd...@linaro.org> writes: > On Wed, 15 Feb 2023 at 19:05, Markus Armbruster <arm...@redhat.com> wrote: >> >> The discussion under PATCH 6 makes me think there's a bit of confusion >> about the actual impact of dropping support for Python 3.6. Possibly >> because it's spelled out in the commit message of PATCH 7. Let me >> summarize it in one sentence: >> >> *** All supported host systems continue to work *** >> >> Evidence: CI remains green. >> >> On some supported host systems, different packages need to be installed. >> On CentOS 8, for instance, we need to install Python 3.8.13 or 3.9.16 >> instead of 3.6.8. Let me stress again: same repository, different >> package. No downsides I can see. > > Yes; I never had any issues with this part of it. If there was > a "Sphinx that also used that Python" in that repo, the answer > would be easy. > >> The *one* exception is Sphinx on CentOS 8. CentOS 8 does not ship a >> version of Sphinx that works with Python 3.7 or newer. This series >> proposes to simply stop building the docs there, unless the user >> provides a suitable version of Sphinx (which is easy enough with pip). >> That's PATCH 7. > > Yes; this brings CentOS 8 down from "fully supported" to "kinda > supported but not for everything", which is less than ideal.
I acknowledge there's a difference between "you need to dnf install python-sphinx to be able to build docs" and "you need to pip install sphinx to be able to build docs", and that the difference is negligible in some scenarios, and a show stopper in others. I wasn't fully aware of the latter. > I think the level of not-idealness of that side of the scales > is probably clear enough. The difficulty I think for those who > haven't had their arms deep in QEMU's Python code is not having > the background info to be able to weigh up how heavy the other side > of the tradeoff scales is (since the naive "well, just keep writing > Python 3.6 for the moment" take is clearly wrong). Fair point. I hope the situation is more clear now.
