[Twisted-Python] Python 2.7 on CentOS 6 (was: PotentialZombieWarning warning message?)

[Amber "Hawkie" Brown]

> On 15 Dec 2015, at 08:43, Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
> 
>>> But again: Python 2.6 is unsupported by the upstream Python developers.  You
>>> really should not be using it, since it won't receive security updates (of
>>> course, Red Hat and transitively CentOS claim to "support" these packages,
>>> but if upstream is refusing patches at this point, it's not clear where that
>>> support will come from).
>> 
>> As you can imagine, this boils down to politics.
> 
> I understand that things like this often do, which is exactly why I want to make it clear that we (speaking in terms of the broader Python community now, not just Twisted) are trying to push people towards more recent versions just because they're more fun or more aesthetically pleasant, but because there are very real risks associated with being on unsupported ancient versions of things.  It pains me not to be supporting a configuration that some users want, but there is a line where "conservative about change" becomes "negligent about maintenance" and python 2.6 crossed it a little over two years ago :-).

There is a solution to this, and Nick Coghlan has mentioned it to me many times -- Software Collections for RHEL and CentOS. Software Collections is RH's answer to "new software" on "stable distributions" --  SCLs operate side-by-side with system packages, so it won't break anything. Since you're a CentOS 6.7 user, the standard SCL should work (it's 6.5+).

You can find the Python 2.7 SCL at https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/python27/, and CentOS publishes instructions on using them on https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/SCL . This might solve your problem of being restrained to CentOS 6, but Python 2.6 being EOL'd everywhere but it.

- Amber
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