Re: Python 3.11 for bookworm?
There is not yet an accurate estimate of time required to fix the
python packages during the transition -- and I still remember the
transition from python3.9 -> python3.10 took a very long period
that does not seem short enough to be covered by the freeze schedule.
Apart from that, package maintainers have their own plans as well.
I believe that at the current stage, many people have assumed that
the next stable will ship python3.10, and have their packages
finalized for freeze already. Making that transition at the current
stage will push a number of maintainers into a rush of updating
their packages again -- in the worst case, the package upstreams
might be not even ready for python 3.11.
A significant Python performance improvement in 3.11 is good.
But note, when python performance has really become an issue,
people already have mature solutions, e.g. offloading the
performance critical part onto a compiled language.
I think the risk of greatly breaking the release plan
outweighs the gain.
On Wed, 2022-12-21 at 20:21 -0500, Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
> Sandro Tosi <morph@debian.org> writes:
>
> > thoughts from a concerned maintainer
> >
>
> Sandro, thank you for writing this email.
>
> >
> > it seems this email advocates for a "let's wing it"[1] type of
> > transition.
> >
> > [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wing_it
> >
> > It appears there has been little work in preparing the work to
> > introduce python3.11 from its maintainer, instead that works has
> > been
> > pushed downstream to maintainers.
> >
> > if we continue with the plan as described above, several python
> > libraries/applications maintainers will be left with the short end
> > of
> > the stick and deal with an unknown amount of issues (upstream fixes
> > not available, not ready and or/ not released, rushed, etc) with
> > less
> > than a month from the beginning of the transition freeze[2]
> >
>
> Agreed. At a bare minimum, complete data from ratt (Rebuild All The
> Things) should be required at this point.
>
> > [2] https://release.debian.org/bullseye/freeze_policy.html
> >
> > [2] also highlights at the very beginning "Plan your changes for
> > bullseye", this change appears as if it was not planned and we
> > should
> > be skeptical to proceed without further (and in advance)
> > understanding
> > of the impact it may have on Bullseye.
> >
>
> 100% +1 I'm especially concerned about how a clear plan was not
> communicated to other teams--whose work will be broken by the
> proposed
> transition, were an exception to be granted.
>
> Debian is not a paragon of community if it makes late, unannounced
> changes that result in a yet-undetermined number of projects being
> dropped from bookworm's release. If Python 3.11 as the only
> supported
> version is a release goal, then the freeze schedule would need to be
> modified.
>
> Regards,
> Nicholas
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