Thomas Klausner <wiz%NetBSD.org@localhost> writes:
> Python 3.7 is on its way out, modules are starting to desupport it.
> The 3.x versions are generally quite easy to switch between, and I
> don't think the effort in supporting Python 3.7 is well-spent.
As always a plea for clarity on removal requests.
(I'm going to assume 2.7 doesn't exist for this discussion.)
First, "on its way out" is vague, and Peter Lai has said that the EOL
date is June of 2023.
Now, pkgsrc is not an LTS, and the only reason we have multiple python
versions in the first place is that python upstream and the community of
package upstreams that are written in python are collectively not good
at compatibility: In an ideal world, we'd just update the single python
version when there was a new stable branch released. But each new
version won't run some python code, and lots of python code needs a
newish version, so here we are. That's a long way of saying: just
because 3.7 isn't formally EOL, we don't have to keep it.
Now, the questions are:
Are there any packages in pkgsrc that only work on 3.7?
Are there any python programs people run, not in pkgsrc, that only
work on 3.7?
Do we think any actual people would have problems with 3.7 removal?
Surely some might still be using 3.7, even though they are very
overdue for updating, and that doesn't IMHO really count. So it's
more about the first two questions.
What's the work in keeping 3.7? It seems it's
- updating to new micros
- having to add PYTHON_VERSIONS_INCOMPATIBLE=37 to various things
- worse, having to mark things not-37 if they depend on something
that doesn't do 37, to avoid breaking esp. pbulk scan (which is
IMHO a pbulk bug, but that's how it seems to be)
It seems to me that there are no good reasons to run 3.7, and that 3.7
is crufty enough that a non-trivial amount of things need to be marked
not-for-37. So that argues for dropping it now.
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