[arch-dev-public] Add active Python versions to the repos

[David Runge]

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.
> 
> Having access to interpreters for older active versions is really
> helpful for Python developers. This allows them to easily run test
> suites against older versions. It is very common for developers to
> maintain software against a couple major releases. Tools like tox or
> nox are able to automate testing against multiple Python versions, just
> needing the interpreter.
> 
> The current active Python releases are:
>   - 3.9
>   - 3.8
>   - 3.7
>   - 3.6
>   - 2.7
> 
> The list can be found here[1].
> 
> So, I propose introducing 2 new packages:
>   - python3.7
>   - python3.6
> 
> And when we update the python package to 3.9:
>   - python3.8
> 
> Does anyone have any big issue with this? What are your thoughts?

I guess a downside is the increase in maintenance burden to provide this
and it potentially leading to things not being ported/ fixed (ergo
fragmentation) as maintainers might want to rely on several interpreters
being around in the future (to build packages against).
However, as you are specifically stating you would like to only have the
interpreters added, maybe that's fine?

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.

Best,
David

[1] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/any/pyenv/

-- 
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