Freeradius 3.0.x and Python 3

[Alan DeKok]

On Oct 21, 2019, at 1:58 AM, PENZ Robert <robert.penz at tirol.gv.at> wrote:
> 
> With the end of this year Python 2 is no longer supported and a big project like Freeradius has still no Python 3 binding in their current stable release. Looking through Github I found someone that backported the python3 module to Freeradius 3.0.x
> 
> https://github.com/foxpass/freeradius-server/compare/v3.0.x...foxpass:python3_for_30x

  There are these things called "pull requests" which GitHub supports.  They allow people to contribute back to a project.  The issue is that some people don't really care to do that.

> Please integrate that into a 3.0.x release, so everyone can use Freeradius and python and be still compliant. As we're a customer of Redhat and RHEL 8 is missing the python module in RHEL 8, we've talked with them and they said that they can only integrate the python3 binding if it's in the upstream release and not only a patch by someone. 

  If only RedHat would share some of that sweet, sweet, support revenue.  But the multi-billion dollar company is to cheap to either do the work themselves, or to pay someone else to do it.

  Instead, they rely on you (the paying customer) to demand that we work for free.  It's a great business model for RedHat, but it makes me more cranky than normal.

  There is a PR requesting this, as you found.  It points to an old PR which wasn't integrated because it crashed the server.  And that's not allowed.

  I'm happy to add that module to v3, so long as someone opens a PR.  I would suggest *one* commit which is "add rlm_python3", instead of the ~40 commits going "fix this, oops, fix that" from the above link.

  While it's terrible to have *both* python2 and python3 modules in the server, I'm also wary of changing existing functionality.  The existing python2 module works, and people expect it to do what it does.  Changing its behaviour in the middle of a stable release is a bad thing.

  BUT, and this is a big BUT.  People have to test it to be sure that it works.  If YOU are willing to do some tests and report back, then it's MUCH more likely that we can integrate the module before 3.0.20 is released.

  What is NOT acceptable is for a multi-billion dollar company, and all of their customers to demand that we work for free, in order to keep them happy.  That's a hard "no".

  Alan DeKok.