On Apr 01, 2011, at 09:47 PM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
FWIW - I maintain legacy code for python2.4, and 2.5 (mainly 2.5). [...] As a result, I'm very much +1 on integrating this patch to previous versions.
Updating 2.4 is clearly out of question; and I veto changing 2.5 in that respect.
Fair enough. I respect your decision for 2.5.
I develop on Ubuntu (and will probably update to 11.04 in a few months) - so this will directly affect me.
I think it is really Ubuntu's fault, not Python's, that it fails to build. They fail to provide backwards compatibility. It also STM that they fail to comply to the FHS with that change...
When I saw this change happen, I did let out a little groan knowing what kind of resistance I'd likely encounter in python-dev. ;)
In any case, it's not that you can't build Python 2.4 anymore on Ubuntu 11.04. You just have to edit Modules/Setup (which *is* a standard build procedure) to point it to the right library paths and names.
Yes, but it's something I'd prefer not to do when cutting a release, because that's also error prone and could mask problems that users would have. But I do agree that we've ruled out any future full releases of Python 2.6, so the kind of testing I would normally go through before a release will not be necessary.
Even if their servers won't run ubuntu 11.04+ (or something with the same library paths), their development environments will.
They can also patch the Python releases themselves, or use Ubuntu packages that someone else made for them (they can probably just install the old 2.4 packages just fine).
The Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2 packages in Ubuntu 11.04 already have essentially the same patch that I posted, so folks using Python 2.6 from the operating system will not have a problem. Without this patch in our repository, folks building Python 2.6 from source will have to be aware of it. Since it's easy enough to back port the patch to 2.6 later should it be necessary, I leave it alone. I think we're still due one last bug fix release of Python 3.1, right? So that leaves applying this patch to 2.7, and 3.1 through 3.3. -Barry