Adam Williamson wrote:
> BTW, there is another point here which you may not appreciate: Fedora
> and Debian aren't really in competition. Fedora does not see its job as
> being to Conquer The World and have everyone run Fedora. Fedora is
> targeted at particular purposes and particular audiences. If a given
> feature isn't actually driving Fedora's mission forward in any way,
> it's reasonable to consider not having it any more, or at least not
> making it a core part of the distribution and subject to blocking
> requirements and so on. There comes a point at which we don't need to
> support Python 2 for the people and use cases at which Fedora is aimed.
> Will there still be people who need Python 2 for *something* at this
> point? Probably! But, just as you point out, if so, they can get it
> somewhere else.
>
> Someone using Debian instead of Fedora because they need Python 2 isn't
> necessarily a *problem* for Fedora. It's only a problem if it would've
> served Fedora's goals and purposes for that person to be using Fedora.
> If what they do isn't really a part of Fedora's goals...why should we
> worry about them using Debian? Debian is a fine distribution. Nothing
> wrong with it.
>
> To put it another way...Debian and Fedora have different purposes and
> different goals. Us dropping Python 2 earlier than Debian do is *things
> working the right way*. We (arguably) do more than Debian to drive the
> adoption and stabilization of new technologies - new stuff tends to
> show up in Fedora earlier than it shows up in Debian. Debian (arguably)
> does more than we do to provide long-term support for older software
> and support for alternate architectures. This is a *good* thing. It's
> an ecosystem that helps everyone.
Except that this argument does not match actual facts. Debian is actually
pretty aggressive at dropping legacy libraries. Debian has dropped Qt 3
several years ago and has already started the process of dropping Qt 4. We
still support these and even kdelibs 3 and 4 in Fedora (mostly because I am
keeping these alive – it turns out that this is actually very little work:
no new upstream releases to care about, just occasionally an FTBFS fix or a
security fix to backport).
The fact that even Debian is not trying to kick out Python 2 yet shows that
it is way too early to even consider it. Fedora is the only distribution
insane enough to do such a radical move with draconian enforcement, even
over the heads of the maintainers of packages depending on Python 2. (We now
need explicit permission to depend on a package, a completely unprecedented
and ridiculous move.)
And this also means that if you need both Qt 3 and Python 2, you are out of
luck, because Debian refuses to carry the former (for no good reason – it
takes me absolutely negligible work to keep Qt 3 working, I last had to
touch it in January) and Fedora refuses to carry the latter (also for no
good reason).
Kevin Kofler
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