[Moin-devel] Python version

[Geoff Gerrietts]

Quoting Thomas Waldmann (tw at waldmann-edv.de):
> 
> Juergen plans to maybe even require Python 2.2 soon, see the plans for 
> version 1.1 and 1.2 in the MoinMoin wiki.

Okay, I'll keep my patches to myself then. I can understand why you
might decide to require a later version; they're much more fun.

> Why do you use such an old version of python? The 2.2.x versions run 
> pretty well!

At home, I do use 2.2.x (unfortunately across a few values for "x" at
the moment); at work, our entire production site (some 250k lines of
code) is written against Python 1.5.2 and an old version of Zope.

Migration would cost about 2-3 weeks of an engineer's time, some
project and release management resources, and 2-3 weeks of the entire
QA team's time, to a total bill of around $10,000 - $15,000.
Engineering has successfully argued that this cost must be absorbed,
but engineering has not been successful in demonstrating that this
cost must be absorbed /soon/. I'm reasonably confident we'll be on a
more recent release within 18 months, because we're getting to the
point where pieces our current platform won't run on new hardware.

Now, there's always the option of installing a separate python2, and
maintaining a suite of modules against that. For a long time, when I
was on RedHat 7.x at home, that was the approach I took. I didn't mind
because the 1.5.2 was really only around to keep RedHat happy, and I
was using 2.x for myself. But, at the office, it's usually easier,
less complicated, and harder to explain if I simply back-port new code
to old interpreters. Most python code is less than a couple thousand
lines, and most of the new features that people are using are simply
convenience constructs: the concepts express fine in another 4-5 lines
of code, but recent versions have delivered one-liners.

Thanks,
--G.

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-- 
Geoff Gerrietts             "Me and my homies, we tag O.D.."
<geoff at gerrietts net>        --Unknown grafitti artist at a party