Breaking python2.4 compatibility for bzr-2.4

[Michael Gliwinski]

On Thursday 21 Apr 2011 08:25:01 John Arbash Meinel wrote:
...
> This is actually a fairly big point to me. The people who say they can't
> run python > 2.4 is because it isn't available at all (in the case of
> RHEL5). If a distribution happens to ship 2.4/5/6 but defaults to 2.4,
> they could still run a bzr that is only compatible with 2.6+.
> 
> ...
> 
> > Comments:
> > 
> > CentOS's latest release is still on Python 2.4.  But CentOS 5.6
> > is merely RHEL 5.6 with RedHat's branding removed (so that it can
> > be released open-source); thus, what John says about RHEL's
> > ancientness arguably applies here too, even though the CentOS
> > release itself is very recent.  They're working on CentOS 6
> > (corresponding to RHEL 6), but no release date has been
> > announced, that I could find.
> > 
> > As John observes, no other distro of note is still stuck at 2.4.
> 
> So CentOS concerns me a bit. However, 5.6 is just a security/bugfix
> update from the 5.0 series. And if you look here:
...
> week, there was still some polish being done on the 5.6 series, but they
> should be switching soon to the v6 series.
> 
> So Real-Soon-Now, for whatever that means. And given that bzr-2.4 final
> is only scheduled for a few months from now, I think we're on perfectly
> reasonable footing. It isn't like CentOS v6 or RHEL v6 are going to have
> bzr-2.4 in them. They probably only have 2.1/2 anyway.

I'm one of those unfortunate people stuck on RHEL/CentOS5 for a good while 
still because of the need to support legacy software.  However, I wouldn't 
actually object to dropping Python 2.4 support.

IIRC, bzr is only available on RHEL 5 and derivatives via external 
repositories like EPEL or RPMForge.  EPEL is currently still on bzr-2.1, but 
even if it was updated to bzr 2.4+, Python 2.6 is also available in EPEL 
(which installs separatelly from system default python so it doesn't cause any 
problems).

My point is, even if bzr-2.4+ dropped python-2.4 support, it wouldn't be 
impossible/too hard to get it going on RHEL-5 and derivatives.


-- 
Michael Gliwinski
Henderson Group Information Services
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