Re: [PATCH v2 0/7] Python: Drop support for Python 3.6

[Peter Maydell]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2023 at 19:05, Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> The discussion under PATCH 6 makes me think there's a bit of confusion
> about the actual impact of dropping support for Python 3.6.  Possibly
> because it's spelled out in the commit message of PATCH 7.  Let me
> summarize it in one sentence:
>
>     *** All supported host systems continue to work ***
>
> Evidence: CI remains green.
>
> On some supported host systems, different packages need to be installed.
> On CentOS 8, for instance, we need to install Python 3.8.13 or 3.9.16
> instead of 3.6.8.  Let me stress again: same repository, different
> package.  No downsides I can see.

Yes; I never had any issues with this part of it. If there was
a "Sphinx that also used that Python" in that repo, the answer
would be easy.

> The *one* exception is Sphinx on CentOS 8.  CentOS 8 does not ship a
> version of Sphinx that works with Python 3.7 or newer.  This series
> proposes to simply stop building the docs there, unless the user
> provides a suitable version of Sphinx (which is easy enough with pip).
> That's PATCH 7.

Yes; this brings CentOS 8 down from "fully supported" to "kinda
supported but not for everything", which is less than ideal.
I think the level of not-idealness of that side of the scales
is probably clear enough. The difficulty I think for those who
haven't had their arms deep in QEMU's Python code is not having
the background info to be able to weigh up how heavy the other side
of the tradeoff scales is (since the naive "well, just keep writing
Python 3.6 for the moment" take is clearly wrong).

thanks
-- PMM