Jan-Philip Gehrcke, PhD

FreeNAS buries Perl in favor of Python

I am happy user of FreeNAS (a great open source storage server solution) and sporadically follow its development. A couple of months ago, William Grzybowski committed revision 22ebffb6 to the FreeNAS code repository. He crafted a lovely commit message:

Dear perl,

You’re very brave, you have been fighting against us for a long, long time.
The time has come to tear you apart and bury you very deep.

Rest In Peace

Indeed, the FreeNAS team chose to build their management system on top of CPython (2.7, in this case). A great choice pro development efficiency and pro community efforts, I guess.

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  1. Sayantan Khan Avatar
    Sayantan Khan

    It would have been more sensible to use Python 3.x in this case, seeing that 2.7 is gonna be phased out in a few years.

    Reply
    1. sigzero Avatar
      sigzero

      Yes, it would have. :(

      Reply
    2. Jan-Philip Gehrcke Avatar
      Jan-Philip Gehrcke

      I do not think that this is an issue. Development for FreeNAS 9 started quite a while ago, and there have been many quirks with Python 3. Many consider Python 3.3 the first version that is worth the effort porting their existing software to. FreeNAS is FreeBSD-based which tends to be conservative with respect to introducing new software. I am not sure about Python 3 support for FreeBSD 9. More importantly, Python 2 will for sure be supported for still quite a while. According to http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/ the definite plan is to make another release in 2015. According to https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-May/099971.html there clearly is the option for further support. I guess that at least security fixes will make it into the 2.7 branch for some more years.

      Even more importantly, mainly the FreeNAS team has to live with their own code. Others do not really depend on it. Probably they are already writing their code in a way that it is easily portable to Python 3.

      Reply
      1. Jan-Philip Gehrcke Avatar
        Jan-Philip Gehrcke

        As of this update to PEP 373: http://hg.python.org/peps/rev/76d43e52d978 it is now clarified that Python 2.7 will be supported up to 2020: http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/

        Reply