803714 - consider supporting multiple versions of python in mozbase

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Testing :: Mozbase, enhancement)

Description

[Jeff Hammel]

Our current requirements for mozbase are definitive albeit confusing:

"""
Mozbase requires python 2.5, 2.6, or 2.7 however, Talos still requires
compatibility with python 2.4 (bug 734466), so mozbase dependencies in
http://hg.mozilla.org/build/talos/file/tip/setup.py *must* be kept
compatible with python 2.4
"""

from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Auto-tools/Projects/MozBase .

Albeit, the truth of the matter is even more complicated than this.
mozdevice is not 2.4 compatible, we just don't use it on python 2.4
slaves. the canonical oauth2 is not compatible with python 2.4, but we
have our own vendor branch.  Similarly, we don't require an old
version of simplejson, but simplejson trunk is not 2.4 compatible.
Probably a few other caveats.

It has been proposed to allow for per-package python version
requirements.  If we do this, we need a way of keeping track of this.
This should be doable by examining the setup.py files.  If a
dependency requires a higher python version the package should also
require a higher python version.  It would also be nice have a single
place to look at to see the python versions required for each package.

This probably isn't hard, but it is low on my priority list.  The
oft-cited logic "we'll require python 2.7 soon so we might as well
code to it now" I consider a non-starter.  Let's not incur technical
debt while avoiding technical debt.  If we want to invest time in
getting on python 2.7 we should do that, but we shouldn't act like we
already have it available until we do.

Comment 1

[Jeff Hammel]

As an example, the following code could go at the top of setup.py:

REQUIRED_VERSION = (2, 7)
import sys
if sys.version_info[:len(REQUIRED_VERSION)] < REQUIRED_VERSION:
    raise Exception("Requires python %s (You have: %s)" % ('.'.join(REQUIRED_VERSION), sys.version))

If we kept REQUIRED_VERSION (or whatever) consistent, we could inspect this intelligently

Comment 2

[Jeff Hammel]

Going to wontfix this unless anyone has any opposition.  This was ticketed by me on request of someone who I can't even recall...so probably obselete