Coexistence (was: Python 2.0b1 is released!)

[Alex Martelli]

"Piet van Oostrum" <piet at cs.uu.nl> wrote in message
news:wzd7ic8k0e.fsf at sunshine.cs.uu.nl...
> Does anyone know if Python 2.0b1 can peacefully coexist with python 1.5.2
> on a Windows machine? (E.g. are there no common registry entries)

I'm not sure of that -- it should, I think, but I have not tried that.
I do have 1.6 and 2.0b1 both installed (on Win98) since I haven't
yet installed the win32all extensions on 2.0b1 (while the 1.6 stuff
I got from ActiveState).  There should be separate registry subtrees
under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Python\PythonCore named
as the various releases you have (ActiveState does not appear to
use this scheme -- I think it's on
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ActiveState\ActivePython\... and
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Python 1.6\Python for Win32\...
instead).

There may of course be *global* settings (not in the registry)
that cause trouble, e.g., the PATH environment variable.  I did
have one easy-to-fix glitch regarding that: the IDLE shortcut
under the Start button, in 2.0b1, is set to run
    D:\Python20\Tools\idle\idle.pyw
which relies on the .pyw extension being handled by pythonw.exe
in the 2.0 directory; as I had my .pyw handled by the 1.6 exe,
this didn't work.  As I said, that's easy to fix; just change the
shortcut's properties to run, explicitly:
    D:\Python20\pythonw.exe D:\Python20\Tools\idle\idle.pyw
and it's fine again.

I was lazy and didn't post that one as a bug on sourceforge,
but it does violate the Python mantra, "explicit is better than
implicit"... and, by misfunctioning due to this violation, it
once again proves it's a very good mantra indeed:-).


Alex