Re: Version Woes

[Frank Crawford]

On Wed, 2020-04-29 at 10:39 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Tomas Pospisek <
> address@hidden
> > writes:
> 
> > > And to follow up to this, not only does F32 have Python 2.7, it
> > > also has
> > > Python 2.6!  So I don't think Python 2 is going away any time
> > > soon.
> > 
> > Python 2 has been officially declared "end of life":
> > 
> > https://www.python.org/doc/sunset-python-2/
> > 
> > 
> > Python is only "not going away" in the sense that you can not erase
> > the
> > past and that still existing remainders of it are not being
> > aggressively
> > deleted. But in most other meanings of that phrase, in particular
> > those
> > related to software, I think one *can* robustly say that "Python 2
> > *is*
> > going away".
> 
> Just because it is EoL doesn't mean it will disappear quickly.  It
> could
> be YEARS before it completely disappears.  For example, the FINAL
> release of Python 2.6 was October 29, 2013 but, as I pointed out,
> it's
> still in Fedora 32 (which was just released YESTERDAY).  This is
> almost
> 7 years past it's EOL date, and it's still being shipped (read:
> supported) by RedHat / Fedora.  Python 2.7 hasn't even been EOLed yet
> (although it's coming quickly)!

I don't know about other distributions, but Fedora is actively
discouraging any Python2 applications.

Python 2.6 and Python 2.7 is only for essential applications that have
not yet been ported, and actually need approval to ship.  If there is
already a port of an application to Python3,such as rdiff-backup,
approval will not gain approval.

In fact, if you review what is available in Fedora 32 you will see that
most things that had both Python2 and Python3 versions now only have
Python3 versions, and many other things have just been dropped.

> So, frankly, based on that 2.6 is still being shipped after 7 years,
> I
> think we have a good DECADE before we'll stop seeing Python 2.7.

The biggest issue with running any Python2 packages is that there will
be no security patches for the underlying framework.

Saying that, there is nothing stopping you from pulling down an old
copy of rdiff-backup 2.8 and maintaining it yourself, as once you put
it on there, nothing will change (ever).

In addition you can run both rdiff-backup 1.2.8 and 2.0.0 on the same
system, however, you will have to do the renaming required to hold
both.  With package installation, we have to ensure that the names and
metadata are different, otherwise you get clashes which stop the
installation of one or other of the packages.

> -derek

Regards
Frank