On Sat, 2020-11-21 at 16:59 +0100, Morten Linderud via arch-dev-public wrote:
On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 04:47:27PM +0100, David Runge wrote:
On 2020-11-21 14:34:24 (+0000), Filipe Laíns via arch-dev-public wrote:
Hi all,
I want to propose adding all active Python versions to [community], not just the latest one. This would only entail adding the interpreter itself, no other packages.
An alternative (in a per-user setup) can be to use pyenv [1]. It works reasonably well with tox etc. and I have used it in the past successfully to develop against several python interpreter versions.
I'm personally not very excited for the idea of adding more python interpreters. I'm a bit concerned that we today say "no packages" but in the future we relax a bit and end up with python36-$pkgname, as it's the pragmatic option as opposed to blocking entire rebuilds or package updates.
We can add a guideline blocking this.
What is the downsides of utilizing something like pyenv? There are user repositories providing older python interpreters as well if people need it.
pyenv forces users to compile the Python interpreter themselves, which can take a long time with --enable-optimizations. None of the user repos available builds with optimizations, or has signed packages AFAIK. Of course they could in the future, but I think having the packages in the repos is much better in terms of security and usability. I run one of the user which provides these packages and I don't see myself fixing any of the issues I pointed out due to technical limitations. Cheers, Filipe Laíns