On Thu, 2022-01-06 at 12:40 +0100, Dan Čermák wrote:
Can't we identify those packages that _must_ be maintained for 3.6 (because they're required for core distro functionality) and maintain only those for both versions, replacing all others with the 3.10 packages?
That ship has sailed for SLE 15: we are more or less guaranteeing our customer's that their SLE 15 GA system will not receive any disrupting (i.e. major version jump) updates and python packages suddenly changing their interpreter version from 3.6 to 3.10 will definitely count as that. Also, I think such a hybrid setup would just result in a huge mess. At that point I'd rather say that we should resort to just shipping Python, pip, wheel & development libraries for all the Python versions that we wish to support.
I'm very much against that. It means we essentially give up packaging python modules. It also means we give up the maintenance and quality promises we used to provide for these packages. We give up a lot of the addon value that the distro used to provide, except for the most conservative fraction of users. The marketing message is: SUSE acknowledges that there's no benefit in distribution packaging of python modules, and that the upstream community does a better maintenance job than we do. This could easily be generalized to other programming environments. IMO pip and virtualenv are only for (some) developers and those who really want to be on the cutting edge. I've always tried to avoid it. The world isn't divided between extremely conservative customers and the cutting edge. IMO there's a lot of value in being able to use official, distribution-supported python 3.10 modules. Just my €0.02 of course, as I'm not a paying customer. Martin