Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] scripts: add argparse module for Python 2.6 compatibility

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

Hi Stefan,

On 08/25/2017 12:57 PM, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> Many scripts can benefit from the standard library argparse module, which has
> improvements over the older optparse module.  Unfortunately argparse was only
> shipped in Python 2.7 so we need a fallback for Python 2.6.

I probably missed some discussion about it, but what are the reasons to 
stay 2.6 compatible?

Python 2.6 support ended during October 2013, 4 years ago... [1] Why 
don't kill it, start deprecating 2.7 which support will end in less than 
3 years from now [2], and move efforts to version 3...?

Apparently we expect a C compiler compatible with GCC >= 4.1 which was 
released on 2006, before Python 2.5 :S
Then QEMU_BUILD_BUG_ON() try to use C11 feature...

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0361/ and
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2013-September/128287.html
[2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/ and
https://pythonclock.org/

Regards,

Phil.

> This patch series adds a copy of argparse.py and updates scripts as necessary
> to import it.
>
> Stefan Hajnoczi (3):
>    scripts: add argparse module for Python 2.6 compatibility
>    docker.py: Python 2.6 argparse compatibility
>    tests: migration/guestperf Python 2.6 argparse compatibility
>
>   COPYING.PYTHON                     |  270 ++++
>   scripts/argparse.py                | 2406 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>   tests/docker/docker.py             |    4 +-
>   tests/migration/guestperf/shell.py |    8 +-
>   4 files changed, 2684 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>   create mode 100644 COPYING.PYTHON
>   create mode 100644 scripts/argparse.py