[jira] [Commented] (BEAM-8152) Provide a way to better control minor+patch versions of Python 3.x interpreters used to run Beam tests locally and on Jenkins.

["Valentyn Tymofieiev (Jira)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEAM-8152?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=17424098#comment-17424098 ] 

Valentyn Tymofieiev commented on BEAM-8152:
-------------------------------------------

Looked a bit into various ways installing Python 3 on Jenkins.

Compiling a desired version from sources and installing it, worked reasonably well on Ubuntu 16:

Steps were like this:

{noformat}
# see:  https://devguide.python.org/setup/
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential gdb lcov libbz2-dev libffi-dev \
      libgdbm-dev liblzma-dev libncurses5-dev libreadline6-dev \
      libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev lzma lzma-dev tk-dev uuid-dev zlib1g-dev
wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.7/Python-3.9.7.tgz
tar -xvf Python-3.9.7.tgz
cd ./Python-3.9.7
./configure
make
sudo make install
{noformat}

Ideally we could have a setup  where we could switch to a different Python version without having to reimage Jenkins. Also running a one-time script on all nodes perhaps can help. For this I looked into 
pyenv. It also works well on ubunutu and can create environments for a particular python version. One complicaiton is, pyenv seems to environments in a particular location where pyenv is installed. 
On Jenkins, it would be better to install virtual environments under /workspace folder that can be cleaned up. Some people were discussing this and other frictions of using pyenv on Jenkins on:
https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv-virtualenv/issues/408#issuecomment-783478626.
   
Another discussion of managing multiple python versions further in this thread: https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/522

In case of Ubuntu, installing a Python version may be possible and easy from https://launchpad.net/~deadsnakes/+archive/ubuntu/ppa repo via:

{noformat}
sudo apt install python3.9 python3.9-dev python3.9-distutils python3.9-venv
{noformat}

Ultimately, the easiest UX for users may be perhaps to assume as few tools as possible, and expect that installations of python3.6, python3.7, python3.8 are available in $PATH, and create virtual environments with venv or virtualenv. Note that according to https://stackoverflow.com/a/47559925/5153670 , using virtualenv does not work well if Python installation is not provided in a system directory, seems that venv is becoming a preferred recommendation.

> Provide a way to better control minor+patch versions of Python 3.x interpreters used to run Beam tests locally and on Jenkins.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: BEAM-8152
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEAM-8152
>             Project: Beam
>          Issue Type: Sub-task
>          Components: sdk-py-core, testing
>            Reporter: Valentyn Tymofieiev
>            Priority: P3
>
> Currently, Beam Python test infrastructure does not provide fine-grained way to control Python interpreter version. The major+minor version are typically selected by virtual environment, and the patch version of interpreter is defined by the version of python package available on machine that is running the tests. 
> For example, Jenkins ubuntu-based machines, use Python 3.5.2 for python 3.5 test suites, while debian-based SDK harness containers for Python 3.5 come with Python 3.5.6, and the python3.5 package available on my dev machine is Python 3.5.4. 
> Throughout development of Python 3.5.x, Cpython implementation details that have changed in and these changes affect certain codepaths in Beam, such as type inference. 
>  
> When we encounter such issues, it is difficult for Beam developers to test their changes against a particular patch version of Python interpreter both remotely and locally. Opening this issue to make it simpler.
> cc: [~markflyhigh] [~yifanzou] [~udim] [~altay] who may have opinions and ideas about how to make this simpler.
> Note that there are separate questions: 
>   1) which patch versions of Python we should test against on Jenkins  
>   2) which patch versions of Python Beam should claim to support. 
> Regardless of the answers to those questions, we may want to make it easier for an engineer to run a test suite against a particular patch version of Python, and/or make it easier to switch which patch version is used by Jenkins. 



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