[Discussion] Minimum Python 3 version required for next release  #389

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1. setrofim commented on May 22, 2019

   

   setrofim

   on May 22, 2019

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   All in all, we might be able to require Python >=3.6 but that means asking people to use PPA. Do you have some kind of informal list of things that are desirable in 3.6 and not in 3.5 ? (formatted literals are definitely desirable :-) but may not be big enough to warrant dropping native xenial support :-( ).

   Release notes for 3.6 are here: https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.6.html

   Having looked through those again, the summary is that there is quite a lot there that we would like to be able to use in WA, but there is nothing that is "essential". So if dropping support for version 3.5 means that a lot of infrastructure would require to be updated, I think we can live without the 3.6 features for now.

   Specifically, I see the following new features and improvements to existing features being useful for WA:

   • PEP487:"Simpler customization of class creation" and "Descriptor Protocol Enhancements" would allow some plugin code to be a lot simpler.
   • PEP519: "FS path protocol" -- given how much path manipulation and tracking happens inside devlib and WA, if would be nice to be able to encapsulate some of it inside path objects.
   • PEP498 and PEP515: while these are basically just syntactic sugar, I can see them making code significantly more readable in some cases. (PEP498 is what triggered this whole discussion).
   • Other things, such as PEP525, PEP530, and PEP526, are not immediately relevant to the current code, but I can see them being useful in the future.

   👍React with 👍1Reacted by Pierre-Clément Tosi
2. douglas-raillard-arm commented on May 23, 2019

   

   douglas-raillard-arm

   on May 23, 2019

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   PEP519: "FS path protocol" -- given how much path manipulation and tracking happens inside devlib and WA, if would be nice to be able to encapsulate some of it inside path objects.

   Some tools (exekall) in LISA use pathlib.Path objects extensively. The main annoyance with <3.6 is that str() needs to be called all the time before feeding them to most of the library, but these str() can be cleaned up very easily the day 3.5 support is dropped.

   PEP487:"Simpler customization of class creation"

   Would be also useful in LISA to get rid of some metaclasses, and the potential (trivial) metaclass conflicts that can appear.

   Other useful additions to Python 3.6:

   • "Two new enumeration base classes have been added to the enum module: Flag and IntFlags. Both are used to define constants that can be combined using the bitwise operators."
     https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.6.html#enum
3. setrofim commented on Jun 19, 2019

   

   setrofim

   on Jun 19, 2019

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   A point was made that this discussion was never concluded; so I'm going to make the following call: We're going to continue supporting Python 3.5 for at least the next release in order to avoid migration hassle for infrastructure running on Ubuntu 16.04 (which still appears to be fairly wide-spread). This decision will be revisited for future releases.

   Please feel free to re-open the issue if you strongly disagree with this.
4. setrofim

   closed this as completedon Jun 19, 2019