Python 1.5.x vs Python 2.x.x

[Chris Barker]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> 
> Fernando Pérez <fperez528 at yahoo.com> writes:
> > All the scripts for which this is an issue are distributed by them, as part
> > of their own system setup. So they can point every script which explicitly
> > needs 1.5 to use it.
> >
> > They cause their users a fair amount of annoyance and I have yet to
> > see a solid technical reason to justify it.

Frankly the only thing RedHat did differently than every other OS
distributer is use Python for a lot of their adminstation stuff. I have
NEVER seen a python script distibuted that used anything other than
"python" as the name of the executable in the #! line.

> IMO the annoyance was caused by the needless incompatibility between
> Python 1.5.x and 2.x.x.

I half agree. I think trying to keep Python continuously backward
compatible would be a mistake: I really like a lot of the
changes/improvements. THe mistake is that there is no way to deal with
version incompatability in Python itself. No way to tag code as
requiring a given version etc.

If it were the "standard" for everyone to call Python 2.* "python2" then
there would be no problem with any of RedHat's stuff, or any other old
scripts. 

> The redhat people had a product to ship on a
> deadline; yes they could have updated all those scripts and QA'd them
> again, but at the expense of either a schedule slip or resources being
> directed away from something else.  Instead, they stuck with what
> worked.  Maybe they'll update the scripts in a future Redhat release.

Hopefully they will. RedHat could certainly distribute both 1.5 and 2.2
in the future, and change all the #! lines to python1.5. I hope they do,
but frankly, I don't think they should have to. I think it is up to the
Python developers to make this easy. This will only get worse as new
versions come out...we really do need to do something about it.

-Chris






-- 
Christopher Barker,
Ph.D.                                                           
ChrisHBarker at attbi.net                ---           ---           ---
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