[Mageia-dev] Python Packaging Policy

Michael scherer misc at zarb.org
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


More information about the Mageia-dev mailing list