[Mageia-dev] Python Packaging Policy

Wed Jul 13 09:13:06 CEST 2011

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 03:03:46PM +0200, philippe makowski wrote:
+> Hi,
+> 
+> remember this first draft (http://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=python_policy)
+> that is still a draft
+> 
+> now we have also Python3 so we really need to write our policy
+> I see mainly two majors points :
+> 
+> 1/ pyc, pyo management
+> 2/ having Python2 and Python3
+> 
+> about 1/ :
+> it seems that the best would be to package only py (smallest packages)
+> and having triggers on install and on remove to manage pyc and pyo
+> (That's in fact the Debian way
+> (http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/python-policy/ch-module_packages.html#s-byte_compilation))
+> 
+> if we go this way, we need someone to write triggers and people to
+> review all Python packages
+> (I'm ok to work on that review, for triggers, I have no clue on how to
+> do, but may be that with some help I could try)
+
+The tricky part was not to make sure that file are properly ghosted ?
+ 
+> about 2/ :
+> 
+> again we have to review all Python packages to see if they run under
+> Python3 or not and to package them for Python2 and Python3
+> (I'm ok to work on that review)
+> may be that the Fedora policy can help us for that ?:
+> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Python
+
+I would be in favor of treating python2 and python 3 as 2 differents languages.
+The rational is that :
+- we cannot garantee to have support for both
+-  we will likely have some module who would be updated only on 
+python 3 sooner or later
+- we will need to do upgrade of package at different time, since both python2 and python3 are
+released at different time.
+
+So rather than a complex scheme that will confuse packagers, just consider they 
+are separate, and use the almost same policy ( with s/python/python3/ )
+
+Regarding a review of all package, that sound like daunting task :/
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+