CY2027 Draft Published

[Francois Chardavoine]

Hello VFX Platform friends & family!

The Draft CY2027 VFX Reference Platform has been published at https://vfxplatform.com.

The main headline is what we had already announced last year, which is moving to glibc 2.34, which effectively mandates that everyone should be on an EL9 Linux OS (or equivalent) by then.

The majority of the other components are staying fixed, given that we had big updates last year with C++ and Qt.

Once again, the topic of USD was also discussed, but the consensus continues to be in favor of not locking down a version, in order for vendors to be able to lean forward and adopt new functionality rapidly. We do welcome feedback here to better shape future guidance as well.

To provide feedback on this Draft Platform, you can reply to this thread or respond privately to the Working Group by emailing feed...@vfxplatform.com.

As usual, we are looking to lock down the Final version at the start of September, following any additional discussion or feedback provided here, or in person at SIGGRAPH in the summer.

 

Francois

on behalf of the VFX Reference Platform Working Group

[Bastien Montagne]

Hi,

Once again, Python is frozen to a 2+ years old version that will not even get bug fixes anymore in 2027... Can we get the rationals behind that part of the proposal? Especially considering that Python typically has a very strong backward compatibility.

Being stuck on one year old version of the language is already pretty annoying, but 2 years old IMHO should really be avoided - unless there is a very good reason for it?

Cheers,
Bastien

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[Steven Shapiro]

Thank you for reviewing the draft and giving your feedback. 

In large part, we think that a relatively smaller change set this year is warranted given the past couple change sets and the EL9 move this time. Many studios are still playing catch up. Is there something specific that you are concerned about or you believe is high value to purpose a higher version?

Kind regards,
Steve

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Steven Shapiro
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[Mark Final]

Hello,

The rationale on holding the Python version at 3.13 is linked to PySide version.

This information from Qt company, https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_Python#Python_compatibility_matrix, tells us that Python 3.14 support for PySide starts to appear first in v6.10.

While 6.10 is already available, see https://wiki.qt.io/QtReleasing#Qt_releases, LTS versions are preferred. The next LTS is Qt 6.12, with an estimated release in September 2026. This is both too late in the VFX RP discussion cycle to 'make sure all the pieces work' for a large component like Qt, and would always be preferred to let a new release settle in with bug fixes in a few patch releases before adoption. So 6.12 felt out of reach to suggest for VFX27, thus recommended to remain on the current 6.8 LTS. PySide must be in major.minor lockstep with Qt for compatibilty, which subsequently held Python too.

I hope that gives insight into the recommendation.

Thanks

Mark

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Mark Final

Portfolio Architect

[Bob Davis]

I posted this in the Slack group, but it was suggested I also reply here - 

It may be worth noting that RHEL will be skipping python 3.13, so it won't be included in "base RHEL" or in AppStreams.  It’s documented here - https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7130013

For those who don’t have access to that article, the tl;dr is that for python, Red Hat decided to ship 2 out of every 3 versions (3.9, 3.11, 3.12, ...) officially and skip every third (3.10, 3.13) version. 

"Each language stack maintainer needs to make a decision about which versions to ship in RHEL version, because shipping more versions means a larger CVE attack surface and more costly maintenance."

It is available in EPEL though, so if you need it, it can be installed. Just remember that EPEL is a Fedora community project, with its own set of constraints, separate from RHEL.

Thanks -

Bob

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Bob Davis

Product Manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

bobd...@redhat.com 

[Bastien Montagne]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the insights. It is really unfortunate that such a major component as Python has to be hold back that much by other dependencies, but at least it makes more sense now.

Cheers,
Bastien.