I hear you. 

First of all, what you call 1.6.12 alpha is a patched version of 1.6.x (fixing several CVE). It is possible to write applications running on all Django
releases.

SInce EPEL is LTS supported, I should upgrade to 1.8.x (the current LTS release). Unfortunately that would break at least reviewboard on EPEL, which still requires Django-1.6.x

(In reply to Matthias Runge from comment #1)
> SInce EPEL is LTS supported, I should upgrade to 1.8.x (the current LTS
> release). Unfortunately that would break at least reviewboard on EPEL, which
> still requires Django-1.6.x
From stability aspect, I can understand we should at least make things work in EPEL instead of update and break them.
So for now I will have to deal with my work in virtualenv.

Interesting to see Fedora simply obsoleted reviewboard from repo.

I've been told, about 2/3rd of all reviewboard installs are based on EPEL7.

Are there any (technical) reasons for not updating to 1.8 and creating a python-django-16 compatibility package? Besides nobody having time to actually do that and maintain it.

Let's be clear: Django-1.6 is unmaintained upstream; I don't see a point in creating a compatibility package. 

I'd be happy to update to 1.8, let's wait for Stephen and his opinion.

(In reply to Matthias Runge from comment #5)
> Let's be clear: Django-1.6 is unmaintained upstream; I don't see a point in
> creating a compatibility package. 

The point would be to not break reviewboard which currently does not support Django > 1.6. Reviewboard 3.0 supports a newer Django but is still in Beta.

I personally don't care about reviewboard, I wouldn't mind.

We could think about having separate packages for each Django minor version (python-django16, python-django17, ...) or shipping Django in SoftwareCollections.

BTW, SoftwareCollections is the only way (except heavy patching of Django) to run Django 1.8 on el6, because it needs newer Python.

However, you'll likely depend on other packages not included in Fedora/EPEL anyway, so pip (using virtualenv or docker) is the right way to deal with Python packages, if you develop portable applications.

From my point of view, the only reason for maintaining packages like Django (so rapidly changing) in Fedora/EPEL is because some other Fedora/EPEL packages may require them.

OK, so some context:

1) Django 1.6 actually is maintained[1], just not by the main Django upstream. It is maintained by the ReviewBoard developers in a fork approved by the Django upstream. That is the version I keep packaged in EPEL 7

2) I'd love to upgrade to newer Django. I've been trying to find time lately to patch ReviewBoard and Django 1.6 into an alternate package so we can upgrade the main Django package. This time has been very hard to come by. Since that may have not been clear: I'm probably going to fork a compatibility package like python-django16 and use setuptools tricks to make it parallel-installable with python-django and still work with Review Board and its dependencies.

I can't promise I'll have the time in the immediate future, however.

Review Board is actually quite popular in EPEL; It appears to be almost even with the pip installed versions as far as deployments. It would break a lot of production environments if we upgrade Django out from under it without a migration strategy.

If anyone is willing to help me with this effort, I'd really appreciate it. My $DAYJOB doesn't leave a lot of time for this right now.


[1] https://www.reviewboard.org/news/2017/04/04/new-django-1-6-11-6-security-releases/

I've just opened a package review request for a python-django16 compatibility package. I'm going to work on getting Review Board to be able to run against that version; once it can, we can upgrade python-django in EPEL 7.

Stephen, bad bug number?

I've rebased Django to 1.11.13.

Please test carefully.

python-django-1.11.13-2.el7 has been submitted as an update to Fedora EPEL 7. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2018-b4d4e0a3eb

python-django-1.11.13-2.el7 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 7 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for
instructions on how to install test updates.
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2018-b4d4e0a3eb

python-django-1.11.13-4.el7 has been submitted as an update to Fedora EPEL 7. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2018-2206653eb9

python-django-1.11.13-4.el7, python-django16-1.6.11.7-5.el7 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 7 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for
instructions on how to install test updates.
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2018-2206653eb9

python-django-1.11.13-4.el7, python-django16-1.6.11.7-5.el7 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 7 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.