launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

["Francis J. Lacoste" <francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you Barry for this extensive write-up of the situation. Answers to
your question follows below.

On 11-09-13 05:00 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> Hi Launchpadders,
> 

[...]

> 
> The plan we hatched at UDS-O was to back port Python 2.7 and a few dozen
> packages that Francis identified to a Lucid PPA.  Then, the Launchpad servers
> could add that PPA while they were still on 10.04 and switch to Python 2.7
> before they upgraded to 12.04.  Francis tells me that Launchpad already runs
> fairly well on Python 2.7 + Oneiric on developer machines, with just one or
> two test failures.

That's actually from hear-say and from a while back. I don't know the
exact status of this today, but to me the biggest hurdles around this
have always been the deployment issues.

[...]

> 
> After some discussion with Francis and Steve Langasek, I think a more fruitful
> approach will be to forward port Python 2.6 to a P-series PPA, and then make
> this available to Launchpad, so that it could continue to run on Python 2.6
> even after it upgraded to 12.04.  Then at its leisure, Launchpad would make
> the switch to Python 2.7 and get rid of the PPA.

The only downside for us with this plan is that we won't be able to
update to python 2.7 until our data centre machines are migrated to
12.04 LTS. We are usually eager to update, so probably among the first
to upgrade, but that still means that python 2.7 would be something like
8-9 months away. I don't think it's such big a deal, but let's see if
others disagree.

[...]

> 
> Steve brought up one good question, which is whether, after upgrading the LP
> server to 12.04, you will also rebuild Launchpad.  

We don't rebuild by default after a reboot, but rebuilding isn't a big
deal :-)

> Another question is whether
> LP needs Python 2.6 to be the default Python, or just a supported version.

Just a supported version. We specify which interpreter to use.

>  I think LP can fairly easily specify which version of Python to build against,
> so ideally, after the LTS upgrade, you'd just enable the PPA and do a manual
> rebuild of Launchpad against the non-default Python 2.6.  Definitely let me
> know of that's *not* the case.

No, that's about it.

> 
> Any and all feedback will be greatly appreciated.  I'll commit to working on
> this once 12.04 opens up, we've removed Python 2.6 from the archive, and
> rebuilt enough of the P-series archive to have a valid PPA overriding it.  Of
> course, if we backtrack on removing 2.6 from 12.04, then the whole issue is
> moot. <wink>
> 

Thanks a lot for following-up on this.

-- 
Francis J. Lacoste
francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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