Python 2.1.x bugs Re: [SciPy-dev] Building scipy on Debian Woody.

[Pearu Peterson]

Hi!

On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Prabhu Ramachandran wrote:

> FWIW, I'd like to mention that somehow Python 2.1.2 has some trouble
> with f2py.  I still havent figured this out.  Pearu was saying that
> upgrading to Python 2.2 fixes this.

Yes, now I am pretty convinced that Python 2.1.2 has still some bugs in it
that make f2py generated extension modules to crash. I expect that one
might have this trouble with any extension module that imports other
extension modules and such modules are used within one Python session or
script.

Ok, why I am so convinced?
1) There is no problem when using Python 2.0 or Python 2.2. I have checked
that.
2) This problem occurs only with Python 2.1.1 and Python 2.1.2 (I think
Python 2.1 (or 2.1b) still worked correctly but I cannot verify that).
Python 2.1.2 reports that python 2.1.1 may crash with extension
modules that does similar what I described above and it claims that this
bug is fixed. But I suspect that there are still related bugs in Python
2.1.2 that mess up namespaces and causing segmentation faults in debian
and possibly in other unices as well.

I know that Python 2.1.x is very popular and not all third-party packages
are made available to Python 2.2. Therefore users may not be interested in
upgrading to Python 2.2.

Nevertheless, I can only recommend upgrading to Python 2.2 in order to
solve this issue (or there will be Python 2.1.3 with a fix someday, may be
not). I have not reported this bug to Python bug-tracker for the following
reasons:
1) Python 2.2 works.
2) My knowledge of Python internals is too small to report anything more
useful than Python 2.1.2 gives segmentation faults. If someone in the list
is willing to work on the bug report, I am happy to share the symptoms of
this bug.

PS: In order to use scipy_distutils from Python 2.0, one must upgrade
distutils to version >= 1.0.2.

Regards,
	Pearu