Gratitude due to Red Hat? More work for the PBF?

[Cliff Wells]

On Wed, 2002-08-28 at 08:33, Trond Eivind Glomsrød wrote:
> Cliff Wells <LogiplexSoftware at earthlink.net> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 01:59, Steve Holden wrote:
> > > I'm a little hesitant to say this, but today (while, of all things, putting
> > > a sales proposal together) I realised that my attitude to the "Red Hat comes
> > > with 1.5.2" question has now altered. When considering a hosting environment
> > > I am happy to *exclude* any company who can only offer 1.5.2, as they are
> > > clearly not serious about supporting the language environment. This is a
> > > positive thing, as supporting Python isn't yet a common enough skill to be
> > > available from the Interlands and the like.
> > 
> > I submitted a bug report to RH regarding this issue and was basically
> > brushed off with "the RH tools that depend on Python should all work
> > with 2.x if you install all the required packages" [required packages
> > thoughtfully omitted].  Heaven forbid *they* should fix anything.
> 
> Fixing it would mean it was a problem.
> 
> A program originally using python 1.5 and newt would, in almost all cases, work
> just as well with python 2.1 if the newt module was available.

And what of 2.3?  2.4?  RedHat's response assumes
backwards-compatibility of future versions of Python with all of their
scripts and modules.  Unless Guido has loaned them his time-machine this
probably isn't a safe assumption.  Besides "in almost all cases" isn't
exactly reassuring.  

The reality is that most Python developers stay up-to-date with releases
of Python and the RedHat-sanctioned version lags behind by months (you
refer to 2.1 when I've been using 2.2 for quite some time now).

The aggravating thing is that this issue would be a snap for RedHat to
fix.  Instead of preempting /usr/bin/python for their own use, they
could maintain a /usr/bin/python-rh and leave python for user-installed
versions (instead of requiring the user version to be called "python2").

Problem solved, everyone happy.

> -- 
> Trond Eivind Glomsrød
> Red Hat, Inc.

-- 
Cliff Wells, Software Engineer
Logiplex Corporation (www.logiplex.net)
(503) 978-6726 x308  (800) 735-0555 x308