Thanks for starting this initiative and sorry for my late response. Anyway, my 2 cents:
As maintainer of python3 in Fedora, I've already been asked by quite a lot of people to put python3 in EPEL 7. Most notably by DNF maintainer and people from Fedora Infrastructure. My problem with doing this is, that I want to able to actually update python3 point releases (e.g. from 3.4 to 3.5) at some points during EPEL 7 life. So I'm trying to understand how this proposal would help me. Here are my notes and thoughts on the situtation with python3 and the possible solution:
- Generally, python3 point releases can't be safely considered backwards compatible and all depending packages need to be rebuilt.
- The above point I think makes updating python3 go against current EPEL policies. If I wanted to do it "right", I would need to start with python34, then after some time add python35, python36 etc. (for each of these, I'd need to keep the whole stack of dependent libraries, which brings even more iffy problems, like "where should these packages be at dist-git", "should these conflict or be installable in parallel", "when/how do we obsolete the old versions", ...)
- So I'm wondering whether we could have just "python3" and ("python3-*" extension modules and other dependent packages). The "python3" package itself would be updated at time of RHEL point releases, assuming a new minor version has been released prior to the update period (RHEL beta).
- Now, I'm not sure how this should work with extension modules and other packages depending on python3. Would it make sense for them to live in the main repo, assuming they'd depend on a package that lives in the "EPEL-dot" repo? I think not, but this would basically cause all python3 depending packages to live in "EPEL-dot". I'm not sure whether that is a problem or not. It doesn't feel exactly right, but I guess it's the right thing to do...
- So basically the whole python3 stack would need to be rebuilt together during the RHEL beta period, which might be very short, considering that we may be talking about hundreds of packages with dependency cycles etc. In case that the rebuild wouldn't be completed on time, I think it should be safe to just wait for the next RHEL dot release.
Does this make sense? Comments/suggestions?
Thanks a lot!
Slavek