[Python-Dev] My collection of Python 3.5.0 regressions

[Nick Coghlan]

On 19 Sep 2015 15:40, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
>
> Mark Lawrence writes:
>
>  > I agree very strongly with your point here.  Raising umpteen issues
>  > over installation failures when a full release comes out strikes me
>  > as below the belt when there have been multiple previous releases
>  > without a squeak.
>
> Raising issues is always useful and appropriate.  It's up to Larry
> Hastings to decide whether he personally needs to do more work.
>
> I suspect he probably will, though.  I knew these changes were risky
> on the lead time given, even though I don't do Windows, and I'm not a
> core Python developer.  I would hope that Steve Dower and Larry were
> at least as well aware of what they were getting into, and there are a
> lot of Windows users we *want* to support well.  (*Not* "have to", and
> YMMV.  But the Python developer community clearly has a working
> consensus on supporting Windows well.)

There were some pretty big changes on the Windows side of things for Python
3.5.0 - not just porting the installer to the Wix toolset and migrating to
a new of Visual Studio, but also adjusting to some fairly major underlying
changes to the way the Microsoft C runtime works in general. As part of all
that, I believe we also finally switched to being a well behaved Windows
citizen and now default to installing into Program Files rather than the
root of C:\.

With the wide variety of system configurations out there, that degree of
change from past practices was always going to encounter some teething
troubles. Fortunately, we're unlikely to ever have to go through a shift
like this again, and are now in a situation where our installation
practices not only better align with Microsoft's recommendations, but are
able to benefit from future evolution in the Wix toolset rather than
necessarily having to track changes to Microsoft's recommendations directly.

Cheers,
Nick.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20150920/d6f5fe94/attachment.html>