It never fails (bsddb retirement in 2.3)

[Nick Vargish]

"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> writes:

> That looks like bsddb 1.85, indeed, except that it is perhaps
> DEC/Compaq/HP modified.

DEC rarely touched anything without adding their own special... flavor
to it.

> Ok. If you want bsddb185 to be built by default with setup.py, please
> submit a patch to SF. That patch should
  [ .. ]
> If you can't/don't want to produce such a patch, you might want to find
> somebody else who does.

I'm going to save your message and see if time allows me to follow
through. I'm also going to try Skip's suggestion of modifying
Setup/Modules and site.py in combination to get the behavior I had in
2.2.2.

There's been an implication in a couple of messages I've received that
I'm trying to hold the Python community back, or prevent it from
moving forward with a better library. 

That's not the case at all. I don't think it's unreasonable of me to
be perturbed that behavior that I relied upon in one version has
changed, especially since one of the selling points of Python is that
it traditionally is very backwards compatible.

When "import bsddb" gives a new set of features and requires a
different library from the one that a previous version used quite
happily, I consider that not being backwards compatible. Discovering
these issues is part of a beta test, is it not?

Wouldn't it make sense, to some degree, to require the _new_
functionality use a new module name, instead of changing the behavior
of an existing one?

I'm trying very hard to get Python accepted where I work. Anything
that makes installing it more complicated is going to make it harder
to get it accepted. Overt breakage of backwards compatibility is going
to be even wose. Due to the nature of the work environment, I ma
not have root access on the systems, and I will have to write up
instructions for installing the software. With that in mind, would I
be better off using a different library, or abandoning this avenue for
improving the performance of the programs in question? 

Well, thanks to anyone who's bothered to read the rambling post that
this message has become...

Nick

-- 
# sigmask.py  ||  version 0.2  ||  2003-01-07  ||  Feed this to your Python.
print reduce(lambda x,y:x+chr(ord(y)-1),'Ojdl!Wbshjti!=obwAqbusjpu/ofu?','')