[Distutils] Timeframe of 2.0 again?

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Anthony Baxter wrote:
>>>>"M.-A. Lemburg" wrote
>>
>>FWIW, eGenix still ships 1.5.2 compatible packages and we use
>>the CVS version of distutils to built the binary packages.
>>We will drop 1.5.2 support for versions 2.2 of the packages
>>(2.1 currently in beta, still waiting to be announced) and
>>then move on to Python 2.1 as minimum requirement for
>>new releases.
> 
> 
> Could you perhaps give us a breakdown of the percentage of people in
> say, the last 3 months, that have downloaded the various packages by
> Python version? This would be (to me, anyway) a good way to get an
> idea of how many folks with 1.5.2 are still installing new versions
> of packages. My gut feel is that while there's probably plenty of 
> people out there with 1.5.2 deployed and in use, the numbers of them
> actually installing new packages will be considerably smaller.

Sure, but if you want to support older versions, you sometimes
also have to ship new packages to these users, e.g. to fix
bugs.

Here's a breakdown of the downloads we had for 2003 so far:

Package         Python 1.5.2    Python 2.0      Python 2.1
egenix-mx-base  4.27%           2.09%           8.73%

Package         Python 2.2      Python 2.3
egenix-mx-base  44.12%          10.08%

Package         Source ZIP      Source TAR.GZ
egenix-mx-base  4.34%           26.38%

It's hard to tell how big the current installed user base
is, but the fact that people are still downloading older
versions underlines the fact that people are still running
these (Python 1.5.2 is still one of the fastest Python versions
around, BTW; only Python 2.3 can catch up with its performance,
Python 2.2 is a nightmare compared to it).

> Personally, I'd _love_ to move to 2.3 for the logging and optparse
> packages alone - perhaps we could ship a version with logging and
> optparse included for 2.1 and 2.2.
> 
> (And, ideally, once pypi gets dependency tracking, we could make
> all this magically happen...)

Why not make all these features optional and dependent on the
version running distutils ?

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

Professional Python Software directly from the Source  (#1, Oct 27 2003)
 >>> Python/Zope Products & Consulting ...         http://www.egenix.com/
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