[Rpm-maint] [rpm] initial embedded python interpreter support (@rpm5.org derived) (#25)

[Florian Festi]

On 11/19/2015 04:09 PM, Vít Ondruch wrote:
> What is the usecase for this? Isn't this just feature bloat?

I kinda agree that this looks like feature bloat. This patch set needs a
very good justification to go in upstream. The overall trend is to
rather keep minimal installs smaller as this is a big issue for
containers and VMs. Python is one of the candidates to be thrown out at
some point.

Also embedding a particular version of Python into rpm itself makes this
Python version part of the spec syntax with all kind of possibly ugly
implications.

It also seems to not bring many benefits except from saving the
interpreter starting time (which can be significant if there are many
Python scriptlets). But the trend here is also to rather getting rid of
more of the scriptlets using the new file trigger feature (We'll see how
this works out).

Having access to the transaction objects of the running rpm instance
could give such justification as it can hardly done in any other way.
But I really, really doubt that we wan to go down that route. Especially
as it gives a whole new way of how scriptlets can break a transaction.

As the patch set is not interfering with many places in the rpm code it
should be not too hard to maintain the changes outside of the upstream
repository for distributions with (still) rely on this feature.

Florian

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