From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andreas Florath Subject: Suggestion: drop python 2.3 support for xen-3.5 Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:47:14 +0200 Message-ID: <4A8AE922.8030507@flonatel.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: xen-devel@lists.xensource.com List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org Hello! I suggest dropping python 2.3 support for xen-3.5. Major Reason: o Functionality / Libraries are missing: Example: for a new feature I'm working on a 'working' base64 encoding and decoding is needed. The one which comes with python 2.3 is not usable. There is the possibility to copy over the 2.4ff implementation into the Xen source tree or to implement this functionality (again). IMHO both ways are not sensible. Additional minor ones: o Syntactic sugar is missing; e.g.: @staticmethod must be expressed by 'function_name = staticmethod(function_name)' The first makes the code more readable. o 'try: except: finally:' construct is missing in python 2.3 This can be rewritten using 'try: { try: except: } finally:' but this is not really nice. Rational: o Only very old distributions use python versions less than 2.4. And IMHO those old versions will never update to xen-3.5. Typically the enterprise distributions (like RHEL or SLES) will stay at the same (major) version for each package during the life cycle of the distribution's release. [For me it looks that only a very few people running old systems with xen-3.5. I exchanged some EMails with Isaku Yamahata and KUWAMURA Shin'ya (from FUJITSU) - and even those told me that they are planing to update in near future or even started to update.] I read an earlier discussion about this [1], but things are getting more difficult to use only python 2.3 functionality... Additionally it makes sense (and IMHO it is important) to have a kind of roadmap which python version is supported in which release of Xen. At some point it must be decided, how to deal with python 3. AFAIK there is a smooth migration path to 3.X from 2.6 only - not from 2.4 or 2.5 So a support matrix might look like: Xen | Supported Python Versions ----+--------------------------- 3.4 | 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 3.5 | 2.4 2.5 2.6 3.6 | 2.5 2.6 3.7 | 2.6 3.1 4.0 | 3.1 3.2 (Of course starting with Xen 3.6 this is only for illustration.) Kind regards Andreas [1] http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2009-05/msg01331.html