Redhat 7.1 and Python 2.1

[Mats Wichmann]

On Thu, 24 May 2001 23:50:13 +0200, Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>
wrote:

>On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 03:36:54PM -0600, Jason R. Mastaler wrote:
>> "C.L" <no at spam.org> writes:
>> 
>> > - Why doesn't Redhat ship with Python 2.1?  The 1.5.2 it ships with
>> > is a little dated isn't it?
>> Yes, totally.
>
>> The reasons according to a couple RedHat developers are:
>
>>   "Compatibility - the newer versions aren't compatible with 1.5, and
>>    they don't even store modules in the same location."
>
>>   "Binary compatibility issues. We don't break binary compatibility in
>>    a minor release, and the binary format for python modules has
>>    changed."
>
>I find it terribly amusing how those two 'problems' cancel each other out.
>Binary compatibility shouldn't be an issue because modules are stored in
>different locations anyway! It's really not that hard to ship both python1.5
>and python2.0 (and python2.1, and python2.1.1, and ... ;)

(As noted elsewhere, they do ship Python 2.0 as python2, if you got
the right set of CDs, which few people do since they don't buy fresh
boxes with all the CDs in them).

A little snide flamage here: anytime Red Hat starts talking about not
doing something because of incompatibility, I snicker.  What about the
other few hundred things that were incompatible in 7.0?  Oh, right,
that was a "major release" is apparently allowed to be totally broken.

Like, oh, the C/C++ compiler.  By the way, someone who knows the
magic, please drop me a line (off-list, I know it's been asked here
before but I have poor web access so searching the archives usually is
not easy) on how to do compilation of Python bits on a RH 7.0 system.
On the test box I have to do some stuff on, I can install Python from
RPM, but the disutils still blow up on some of the add-on stuff for
the same reason.

Mats