Plans for a 3.26.0 release.... and more!

[Bret McGuire]

   Greetings everyone!  Things have been a bit quiet around here lately but I can assure you there's been a lot going on behind the scenes.  I believe we're now at a place where we can share with you some of our plans for the Python driver going forward.

   Back in July of last year I mentioned to this list that we were working on a new release whose primary goal was to push into the wild the various fixes that were in master but hadn't yet been included in an official release.  This release (which we've been calling the "clear the decks" release internally) has obviously been delayed but we are still planning on getting it out as 3.26.0.  I'll try to do a better job of keeping this list up-to-date with information on this as we move forward.

    In my previous email I also mentioned that our next release would be dropping support for 2.7.x.  This is still the plan, but we're going to go even further.  In the future our plan is that a given Python driver will aim to support all the active Python releases at the time of its release.  This goal is our ultimate objective, but we're going to get there in stages.  The goal of 3.26.0 is to release changes we already have in master so we won't be delaying that release by doing any additional work around supporting additional versions.  As a result 3.26.0 will aim to support the intersection of "Python versions currently supported by cassandra-driver" and "active Python releases".  The contents of this intersection are Python 3.7 and 3.8, although remember that our objective is to get 3.26.0 out soon so we won't be removing anything tied to support of earlier versions yet; we just won't list them as supported versions or test against them in our CI framework.  Future releases will add support for newer Python runtimes and remove code aimed at supporting earlier runtimes; I'm hoping some of the code specific to 2.7.x is gone in the next release, for instance.  We hope to get started on the first of these future releases soon after 3.26.0 goes out the door but clearly we've been delayed in the past and it's not impossible that we'll be delayed in the future.  We genuinely appreciate your patience!

   Watch this space for future details!  And thanks for all the work this community has done to make the Cassandra driver as awesome as it is!

  - Bret -

[Andy S]

Hi,

thanks for the news! Given that Python 3.7 support ends in less than four months, and Python 3.8 in about 1.5 years, what are the plans for supporting more recent Python releases in python-driver? Python 3.10 is more than year old already, and many projects want to support that.

- Andy

[Jeremiah Jordan]

In the future our plan is that a given Python driver will aim to support all the active Python releases at the time of its release.

Per the above statement. I think the plans is that hopefully the release after the 3.26.0 “catch up” release will be able to bring support for all current active releases.

On Mar 6, 2023, at 6:42 PM, Andy S <andy.s...@gmail.com> wrote:



--
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to python-driver-u...@lists.datastax.com.

[Bret McGuire]

   Jeremiah has it exactly right.  If all goes well the next release after 3.26.0 will explicit support all Python runtimes that are themselves still supported.  We are working on some other things for the Python driver so it's possible that functionality will land first, but even if it does a release supporting 3.7 [1] through 3.11 will (hopefully) not be far off. 

[1] Assuming we can complete all this work by June 27th of 2023 when official support for Python 3.7 ends.  If we get delayed Python 3.7 support would be dropped from that release per the versioning policy we discussed earlier.

[Ron Barry]

Looking for an update. Given the statement, "If all goes well, the release after 3.26.0 will explicit [sic] support all Python runtimes...", and the fact that we're currently on 3.28.0 with no 3.11 support, I gather all did not go well. =]. Do we have an eta on a new runtime?

Given that python 3.7 just went out of support, I'm having to update all of our services to a newer python version. Rather than having to do this every year, we have been taking the step of moving our services over to 3.11. It's been a significant effort and have only just stumbled across the fact that the cassandra driver will prevent us from going any further than 3.8. Will we be seeing 3.11 support in the near enough future that I can continue the 3.11 effort, or should I shelve it and restart the update work with 3.8 as a target?

  Thanks...

[Federico Fissore]

Hi

we are using python 3.11 and cassandra-driver 3.28.0 and all is well.
The pypi readme is outdated
https://pypi.org/project/cassandra-driver/, but the files list
prebuilt binaries from 3.11 to 3.7
https://pypi.org/project/cassandra-driver/#files

cheers

federico

On Wed, 12 Jul 2023 at 23:10, 'Ron Barry' via DataStax Python Driver
for Apache Cassandra User Mailing List

[Bida Chen]

Hi,

We recently tried to upgrade python from 3.7 to 3.11 and openssl from 1.x to 3.x. However we encountered an error cassandra.connection.Connection._connect_socket PermissionError: [Errno 1] Tried connecting to []. Last error: [SSL] internal error (_ssl.c:1002)

Do I need some additional setup on the cassandra server side in order for it to work?

[Federico Fissore]

I had some similar problems with another driver switching to openssl
3, and the problem was the old, now untrusted, internal certificate.
Try using openssl directly to connect to Cassandra and see if you get
a similar error. If so, you'll have to either lower openssl
DEFAULT@SECLEVEL to 0 or regenerate the certs

cheers

federico

[Bret McGuire]

    Returning to the question posed by Ron above: I believe I can offer some additional information here. :)

   You are certainly correct; we didn't make it back to updating the supported platforms for the driver in the releases immediately after 3.26.0.  Those releases instead instead introduced a pair of new features into the driver: 3.27.0 introduced column level encryption support while 3.28.0 brought in vector type support.  These changes do not mean we're giving up on the idea of supporting new Python runtimes, it just means the timing has changed a bit.

   Our current plan is to release a new version in the next few months that will extend the runtimes supported by the Python driver to newer versions.  As discussed before the intent is to support all Python versions that are not EOL at the time the next version of the Python driver is released, so this would likely run from Python 3.8 through 3.11.  We're juggling a lot of balls at the moment so I cannot give a more precise date than that but I can say that this effort is one of our goals for the upcoming few months.

   Thanks for your patience, and I'll try to provide updates on this list as things progress!

  - Bret -