[ZF] LWN: Fedora7 dropping Zope due to Python 2.5 incompatibility

[Tres Seaver]

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Lennart Regebro wrote:
> Hang on....
> 
> Are Fedora saying they are going to stop supporting the last major
> release of Python, just because there is a new one out and they can't
> be bothered to support the old one?

Worse than "couldn't be bothered," they actually claim virtue.  From
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/233347/3bfae735b0e102ff/:

  Some Zope users would like to see Fedora ship a "compat-python24"
  package so that Zope will continue to work. There is some opposition
  to this idea, though:

    As the python maintainer, I am *STRONGLY* opposed to a
    compat-python24 package. Because at the end of the day, bug reports
    will get filed against the wrong python package (because end-users
    aren't going to know or case). Security problems are still going to
    end up having to be dealt with and likely through me because the CVE
   will originally get filed against python and no one will think about
    compat-python.

  Jeremy Katz, the maintainer quoted above, would like to see a rule
  allowing a package maintainer to veto the addition of older "compat"
  packages so that they could avoid having to deal with these sorts of
  problems.

> We all know .0 releases can be fidgety. They are ready to within two
> months from the .1 release drop support of the old version? Thats
> honestly quite weird, unless there is something in Python 2.4 that
> just makes is near impossible to run on Fedora 7.
> 
> But if they really refuse, maybe somebody who runs Fedora can
> volunteer to be a Python 2.4 packagemanager for Fedora, if the current
> Python guys really can't be convinced.

Again, I'm not saying this is a "stop the presses" moment for us;  the
immediate damage, in terms of marketing, is already done.  I do think
that staying forward-compatible with new Python versions should be a
goal, moving forward, even if we don't support running Zope on such a
version.  I also believe that fixing this issue is going to require
serious chops, at least for the ExtensionClass stuff.


Tres.
- --
===================================================================
Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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