How ahead are you guys in the (Python) real world?

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

John Salerno wrote:
> Interesting question. Just as a curious follow-up (not being someone who
> works in the programming world), why does it take so long to move to the
> latest version, especially when there aren't (I don't think) any changes
> that would break existing code, such as moving to Python 2.4 from 2.2 or
> 2.3?

Well, let's see.  We have about 5 live servers that would need to be
upgraded.  They're running an old enough version of the OS that 2.2 is
the last supported release.  Fine, building a new python release
ourself is not a huge deal--but it means that we're no longer on the
vendor's automatic update system for python and related packages.

And, of course, we use mod_python.  That needs to be rebuilt against
the new python version.  We also have a number of 3rd-party packages
installed; each of those needs to be re-installed for the new python
version, and possibly rebuilt first if it has any C extension modules.

The real question in most production environments isn't "why not
upgrade?", it's "why upgrade?".  Until a new release has features that
are going to be valuable enough to your project to offset the cost of
upgrading, why would you bother?