Has Red Hat helped or hurt?

[Roman Suzi]

On Tue, 7 May 2002, Tim Roberts wrote:

> Red Hat 7.x uses Python 1.52 for many of its configuration and
> administration activities.  Ordinarily, I'd say this was a Good Thing for
> the betterment and furtherance of Python.
> 
> However, it makes it deucedly difficult to upgrade away from 1.52.  If one
> upgrades /usr/bin/python to be 2.x, all of Red Hat's custom configuration
> scripts are no longer found in site-packages.
> 
> How have other people handled this?  Do you just copy all of
> 1.52/site-packages to 2.x/site-packages?  Do you install Python 2.x into a
> separate directory and grumble every time you have to change the #! line in
> your scripts?  I tried updating all of the #! lines in the Red Hat scripts,
> but this, of course, blows as soon as you do an rpm upgrade of a
> Python-based package.

It's better to know if RedHat configuration tools can be run
under Python 2.x. Has anybody done any tests on this?

RedHat switched to bash2 at last (after 2 (or more?) major RedHat
versions!).  Maybe Python2 is on their radar too.

As for me, I too find it inconvenient to manually handle
#!-lines, but rebuilding rpms by 
python2 setup.py bdist_rpm
with

[bdist_rpm]
python=python2

in /root/.pydistutils.cfg usually helps.
(I only wish all Distutils-using packagers were aware that
Distutils could use RPM too)

And as for the subject, RedHat definitely helps Python.
Python 1.5.2 is stable and compact workhorse version.

> --
> - Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
>   Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
> 

Sincerely yours, Roman A.Suzi
-- 
 - Petrozavodsk - Karelia - Russia - mailto:rnd at onego.ru -