Re: www/trac update and python 2.7 (volunteers, if not drive-by update)

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Brian Buhrow <buhrow%nfbcal.org@localhost> writes:

> 	hello Gregg.  I'm a little confused about your message, but are you saying python-2.7
> should be removed from the pkgsrc tree?  If so, this would break support for the Mailman-v2
> packages.  How much time do you thing it would take to maintian the python-2.7 package?

No, I did not say that we should remove python 2 next month.

I am saying that any python package which is 2.7-only is troubled
because that is a clue that it is unmaintained, and those packages
should have their upstreams release an upgraded version which works with
python 3, and pkgsrc should update to that version.

The presence of python2.7 is causing a lot of work, because we are
having to version packages with old works-with-2.7 versions and the
current versions.  We are approaching a point at which it is too
painful compared to the benefit, especially given that it is
unreasonable for any upstream not to have moved to 3 by now.

So someday, maybe late 2023, maybe 2024, just guessing, I think we're
going to reach the point that there is almost nothing 2.7-only left, and
just nuke it.  Or maybe the set of dependency packages will shrink and
the versioned package set will stabilize.  E.g., there is still
py27-scons, needed for mongo3, needed because mongo4 isn't open
source. That is an impressive tower of problems, starting with the
existence of scons itself!

mailman3 is in wip, and I'm not sure why it isn't in pkgsrc proper.  I'm
also not sure if there are good reasons not to migrate any mailman2
instances to mailman3.  Somebody who really cares about mailman should
address this.

>  And, this is what confuses me, what is the difference between what is
> in the WIP tree and what is in the official pkgsrc tree?

The difference is that wip has less standing.  Anyone can edit wip, more
or less, and we have no quarterly branches.  wip isn't part of bulk
builds.  And, when we make changes to pkgsrc, resulting trouble in wip
is not formally considered, even though some might try to take care of
it.

It really comes down to: if no one cares about trac enough to do an
update to a py3 version, or to stage that update in wip, I'll commit an
update that probably works, and it can be sorted out later if not quite.
So far no one who says they care about trac has spoken up.