[Python-Dev] PEP 250, site-python, site-packages

[Gregor Hoffleit]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2001 at 07:38:00AM -0500, Jeff Epler wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 03, 2001 at 02:09:51PM +0200, Gregor Hoffleit wrote:
> > Due to Python's good tradition of compatibility, this is the vast
> > majority of packages; only packages with binary modules necessarily need
> > to be recompiled anyway for each major new <version>.
> 
> Aren't there bytecode changes in 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1, compared to 1.5.2?  If
> so, this either means that each version of Python does need a separate copy
> (for the .pyc/.pyo file), or if all versions are compatible with 1.5.2
> bytecodes (and I don't know that they are) then all packages would need to
> be bytecompiled with 1.5.2.
> 
> For instance, it appears that between 1.5.2 and 2.1, the UNPACK_LIST
> and UNPACK_TUPLE bytecode instructions were removed and replaced with
> a single UNPACK_SEQUENCE opcode.
> 
> Information gathered by executing:
> 	python -c 'import dis
> 	for name in dis.opname:
> 	    if name[0] != "<": print name' | sort -u > opcodes-1.5.2
> and similarly for python2.

Right, I forgot about that. It's not so bad for Debian though, since
most of our packages byte-compile the stuff only when unpacking the
package. Since installation of a new python-base package recompiles the
complete site-packages tree (but not yet site-python, you got me ;-),
we're not hurt by that problem.

Any other arguments contra ? ;-)

    Gregor