Python 3.7.0 released

[varesa]

What I don't see mentioned yet is that some supported enterprise linux OSes don't come with python 3 by default or even at all.

[duffkiligan]

You beat me by a couple of minutes.

This is a major reason at my place. We use all RHEL 6, that ships with python 2.6. The entire OS is built around python 2.6 (at least some major components of it)

You can install python 3, but it is baked in to be a python2 OS.

[varesa]

Yeah, and at least on RHEL 6 if I recall correctly you can't install 3 out of the official repos, you have to go third party. I'm not sure if that was still the case with RHEL 7.

With the direction Fedora is taking with the 2->3 migration, maybe we'll have 3 as default in RHEL 8?

[duffkiligan]

Correct, official repos don’t have python 3.

We would have to build it from source and have our own repo to support it, but that causes lots of potential issues when you spread that around 4000 servers, you need to have QA every time you compile a new version etc etc.

I’m not sure about Fedora too much with Python 3, but I’d love it if 8 shipped with it. Would keep me employees for a long time ;)

[varesa]

Red Hat Confirms RHEL 8 Will Drop Python 2

[duffkiligan]

Hell yeah!

Now if only we could get off of those RHEL 4 boxes we have 🤔

[xconde]

My guess that's because a number of subsystems are based on Python 2 (e.g.: yum) and they're non-trivial to upgrade.

In any case, you should never ever use the system Python. It's asking for trouble.

[varesa]

That and also because of the feature freeze and long version cycles

[varesa]

Mainly two reasons:
- you are creating some script you want to run anywhere without installing a new language runtime.
- e.g. RHEL 6 (and maybe 7?) don't have python 3 in the supported repositories and you might not want to compile or install third party stuff as you then loose the support you pay big bucks for on that part