Python 2.5 incompatible with Fedora Core 6 - packaging problems again

[John J. Lee]

John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> writes:

> skip at pobox.com wrote:
>  > The distutils setup.py script checks for ncurses bits
> 
>     No, it just plows on after compiler errors.
> 
> > As another person pointed out, you're conflating Python proper with a
> > specific Linux distribution's packaging techniques.
> 
>     Exactly.  As I've pointed out before, Python doesn't play well with
> others.  The Python developers pass the buck to the Linux packager, the
> Linux packager passes the buck to the Python developers, and thus
> the user experience sucks.

I must say in my personal experience this is rather common with, well,
software ;-)

Traditionally, in the open source world, one does something about it,
or shuts up after having made one's point, say, ten or twenty times
<wink>


>     Debian seems to have struggled through this problem, but Red Hat
> apparently just decided to give up keeping up with Python versions.

Red Hat has traditionally been painful with Python.  People say this
is because of their own use of Python scripts, though I don't really
understand why that's caused all the problems they seem to have had.
>From what you say I take it that's still the case... I always used to
just build my own Python and found the pain reduced in my particular
case (still do that, on Ubuntu).  But I typically find that true with
anything "serious" -- compiling my own has often ended up less painful
in the long run, though apparently other people's MMV.

Also there's the traditional open source problem (this one by no means
restricted to Python, or even to open-source OSes -- I suffered this
on Solaris recently) of distros splitting software up and generally
"knowing better" than the maintainer.  I can understand there are
sometimes good security and integration reasons for this, but they
seem to get overzealous.  Recently, there's been some Python-specific
trouble of the "knowing better" kind with setuptools (popular
distutils extension) on various Linux systems, but that seems to have
quietened down now...

And there's always some degree of pain from distutils, which is
unmaintained and not terribly flexible (though still very useful).


John