Python 3.7.1 rollout

[Chris AtLee]

As per our Python Standards document [1], we should have rolled out python
3.7.1 now and migrated our services to it.

Unfortunately, we have hit issues building one of Python's dependencies,
openssl, for the version of CentOS that we're running. We are still
committed to keeping our Python deployments up to date, but in this case it
may make sense to update our underlying deployment stack if we can't get
openssl working.

Progress can be tracked in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1501484

Cheers,
Chris

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseEngineering/Python_Standards

[Rail Aliiev]

Thanks for the update, Chris.

It sounds like our current base system is really old. Maybe we should
consider upgrading the OS? Another solution would be backporting the CentOS
7 openssl RPM to CentOS 6.5.

To try out a completely different thing, I cloned one of the scriptworkers
and tried to install python 3.7 using ... Nix! :)

It took me a few minutes to get python and pip installed, with all required
(down to libc) libraries and stuff. No conflicts, no collisions. ;)
Unpacked, it takes 412M of disk space.

I wonder if we should take a look at either deploying python 3.7 as a
tarball (just tar everything under /nix) or spend some time to write a
puppet package module for Nix.

What do you think?