Nick Coghlan wrote:
They're not unnecessary for Python developers, as if you want to
make
sure you're not accidentally using any features from later versions of
Python, the only way to reliably check that is to actually test your
code on those older versions. Tools like "tox" make that relatively
easy to do, but you still need a straightforward way to get hold of
the old runtimes for tox to use. The addition of these packages to
Fedora means that as soon as you do "dnf install tox", those runtimes
are all brought in automatically via Recommends, rather than having to
jump through multiple hoops to reconfigure your local package
management.
That contradicts churchyard's claim in the FESCo tracker:
| These packages are not intended to be used as dependencies for other
| packages (such as we have some "compat" packages when another package
| needs an older version of a library), hence we want to stop people from
| requiring them, see ​https://fedorahosted.org/fpc/ticket/650 - as a result
| no software in Fedora will ever run on those.
I would also like to point out that if you have these suffixed Python
versions installed, some build scripts may be accidentally picking up those
instead of the recommended default versions of Python.
Kevin Kofler