[CentOS-devel] RHEL 8, and potentially CentOS 8, lack "/usr/bin/python"

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Mon, 13 May 2019 at 14:08, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 8:41 AM Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > A system may have 3 pythons on it , and each one will look in different
> places for libraries
> >
> > platform-python is a minimal python which is meant only for allowing
> system packages to run. It will probably not see much updates over the life
> of RHEL-8. This is based of off python-3.6
> > python2.7 which is the 2.7 version of python and I expect will have a
> lifetime until RHEL-7 is end of lifed. At that point the module will
> probably be ended.
> > python3.6 which is the 3.6 module and may later be end of lifed and
> replaced with python-<major>.<minor> of upstreams choosing.
>
> Begging your pardon, but so what if there are many distinct pythons
> available? It this one is the system default python, great. But this
>

It matters because system-python is paired down to what is needed to run
the things BaseOS comes with. It may not support much else... and most of
the pythonX-FOOBAR packages will not be used by it or vice versa.


> is making various existing tools incompatible, with this and other
> "platform" packages. don't break the existing tools, especially Fedora
> and backporting work from there to RHEL and CentOS. This renaming
> particularly includes the CentOS 7 "extras" packages with "python" in
> the name, all 76 of them. It's creating work.
>
>
Hey.. I am just the messenger here. Shoot me all you want, but it doesn't
change the fact that this is done and shipped by upstream.



> I'm also afraid I don't see where the frequency of updates affects
> this. This is partly because I think it's very optimistic to say that
> python 3.6 won't get any incremental updates. It's already been
> updated once since the original DVD medium was published for RHEL 8.
> It's fairly common to do minor updates to tools like this during point
> releases.
>
>
I didn't mean they wouldn't get updates, I was trying to say that modules
have a different lifetime cycle than the main release. RHEL-8 has a 10 year
lifetime, but python36 may only have a 4 year lifetime (or it might have
8.. future is hazy). The idea is that if python38 or python4 or python52
come out during that 10 years.. RHEL-8 could ship a module set with it in
them.



> This "rename packages as platform-package" name seems confusing and
> unnecessary. If that kind of reference to "platform" versions were
> needed, perhaps it should have been published as a metapackage, with
> "platform-python" empty except for "Includes: python3". As it is, it
> seems merely confusing and in conflict with 20 years of Red Hat
> package naming convention.
>

Again.. I am not disagreeing with you. As far as I can tell, we have to
throw something major out every big release. For the last couple we
completely threw out the init systems (systemV->upstart->systemd) and we
finally stuck that one so naming conventions and sub-packaging are the new
big thing.

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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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