Help: Python for a big commercial project?

[Cereal Muesli]

Hi,

	I need a piece of advice from you, Oh wise Pythoneers! 8-)

  I'm involved in the development of a big DataWarehouse for an important 
TelCo, and I want to propose Python as
  the language of choice for internal maintenance tasks, high level control 
tasks for the loading procedures, etc...
  the people here is not likely to use any free stuff for "serious" 
development (you know...no money = no quality, sigh!),
  but i want to change this, since I believe that Python is really a very 
good product. I have played with Python for
  a year or so under Windows, and before trying to convince people here that 
it is a good choice, I need to know
  some things:

- First of all; do you think that Python is suitable for this
  kind of "serious, big" project?

- The core DW system and ETL logic runs under a HP-UX 11
  system. It seems to me that there are too many complains
  floating around about problems compiling/using Python under
  this platform; am I right? Does anybody have any good/bad
  experiences to share about using Python in this kind of OS?

- Installation: How easy or how hard is the installation of
  Python for HP-UX 11? I don't want to disturb sys admins more
  than necessary; do they have to compile everything? Do they
  need to install GCC to do that? Are there any reliable
  full-featured pre-built binaries for this platform available to
  "download-and-install-in-a-minute"?

- At least two of the candidate modules to be developed in
  Python require a GUI under X Windows. Does the distribution of
  Python for HP-UX include TKinter and TK? Do we need a separate
  download/installation of TCL/TK? In this case, is
  TCL/TK/TKinter hard to build/install/configure for Python?

- Database access would be required for some data analysys
  modules, specifically ORACLE 8 access would definitely be a
  requirement; how well is this supported under HP-UX? I have
  seen there are some 3rd party contributions for DB access
  under Python, but don't know if they work fine for this
  arquitecture/OS. And again, how hard is to make them run in HP-UX
  11 (compilation needed, additional libraries, etc...)?

- Finally: Which version of Python should we use? it seems that
  1.5.x still rules under *NIX, doesn't it?


BIG thanks to everybody, help is *really* appreciated.


Have a nice day!

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