Python in Linux - barrier to Python 3.x

[Michele Simionato]

On Sep 21, 2:29 pm, Ant <ant... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've just seen this:http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1285063820.html
>
> Whatever you think of Zed Shaw (author of the Mongrel Ruby server and
> relatively recent Python convert), he has a very good point in this. I
> run Fedora 12 on my home computers, and find it far too much hassle to
> try to get Python 3 installed. Even the 2.x's are behind - IIRC think
> it currently uses 2.5.
>
> So I really think this is a barrier to entry to Python 3 that we could
> do without - it's the only reason I do all of my Python work in 2.x, I
> would jump at migrating to Python 3 if it was easily available on
> Fedora.
>
> Is there a solution to this that anyone knows of? Has Zed jumped to
> conclusions? Have I?

Zed's approach (removing Python when it could just have downgraded to
Python 2.4) does not look very smart to me. The post itself is pretty
much bullshit. Yes, there are
Linux distributions with old Python versions out there. Yes, if you
don't want to install a newer Python on such distributions you need to
take in account this fact
and not to use modern features of Python. But the situation is not
different for
other languages such as Perl or Ruby. C is free from this problem
because it is a very old and stable language. There is no more content
in that post and everybody should already know such basic facts.


  Michele Simionato