Re: Time to drop plpython2?

Hi,

On 2021-11-15 15:30:02 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Is RHEL7 really an issue? I only have Centos 7 around, but that has python
> > 3.6.
>
> The info I checked said that RHEL7 originally shipped with 3.3.
> I'm not sure that Red Hat would've outright replaced that, but they
> do have a notion of add-on "software collections", and I'm certain
> that they would have provided newer pythons via that mechanism.
> So it should only be a big issue for someone who didn't want to install
> an add-on collection. I suppose the overlap of that group with the
> people who will want to put PG 15+ on that platform is probably nil.

3.6 appears to be in the 'update' repository, which I think is separate from
the add-on collection? It appears to be enabled by default in centos7, not
sure how much that means.

Name : python3
Version : 3.6.8
Release : 18.el7
Architecture: x86_64
Size : 39896
Packager : CentOS BuildSystem <http://bugs.centos.org>
Group : Unspecified
URL : https://www.python.org/
Repository : updates
Summary : Interpreter of the Python programming language
Source : python3-3.6.8-18.el7.src.rpm

> Hmm, I was basing that on (a) what I can see installed on gcc119,
> which is 3.5.1, and (b) AIX 7.2's 2015 release date, which matches up
> pretty well with python 3.5. As with RHEL, it's entirely likely that
> IBM has made newer releases available as add-ons, but there's no
> guarantee that any given installation would have that.

I think AIX itself only ships with python 2.7, and all python3 versions are
from toolbox. But I don't actually know.

> Solaris is a bit worse, since they shipped 11.3 a shade earlier,
> with python 3.4.3. No idea about add-on conventions on that
> platform.

Based solely on some person in meson's irc channel, it appears that they added
a newer python3 sometime in 11.4's lifetime:

alanc:
Solaris 11.4 currently ships Python 3.7 & 3.9
as the maintainer of the meson package for Solaris, I deal with the
lack of newer python versions on older Solaris releases by only packaging
meson for Solaris 11.4, and telling anyone who wants it for older releases to
upgrade their OS, or build all the dependencies themselves
...
or it's 11.4.0 from 2018, and not updated with the latest updates (which are
only available for support customers right now unfortunately) - 3.7 was added
in 11.4.12
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37838_01/html/E99082/bundledfreeware.html
...

> There's room to argue that all three of these will be out of
> primary support before PG15 ships, so maybe we don't need to
> worry about whether we can build with their default toolsets.
> Still, it's a tradeoff I'd rather not make.

There's two other paths worth mentioning:
- muon is a WIP alternative implementation of meson in plain C99. Doesn't yet
have enough feature coverage.
- pyinstaller generates an executable from the meson python code, and supports
solaris and aix

Greetings,

Andres Freund