Issues migrating from Solaris to RedHat 9?

[Paul Boddie]

Tom Loredo <loredo at somewhere.cornell.edu> wrote in message news:<3F7B3521.C160F2DC at somewhere.cornell.edu>...
> 
> I'm about to move from a Solaris 8/SPARC environment to a Dell running
> RedHat 9.  Are there any issues I need to be aware of in bringing my
> Python code over (mostly scientific computation)?

I suppose that there could be compilation issues with any C/C++
extensions you may have written - most mainstream extensions should
have resolved any such portability problems by now, GCC 3.x surprises
notwithstanding.

> In particular, I know earlier versions of RH shipped with an "old" Python
> installed as "python" and that installation of more recent versions should not
> overwrite "python" (e.g., install as "python2.3").  Is this still the case in
> RH9?

I don't believe so. Still, you should be aware of what you're
installing (and where) regardless of platform. Generally, Python gets
installed into /usr/local unless you configure the source code
installation process differently. On Red Hat, the default Python has
always lived in /usr.

> Any other issues?  I will be simultaneously developing for multiple
> platforms, so avoiding something like having to have "/bin/env python2.3"
> at the top of scripts is highly desirable.

Shouldn't that be /usr/bin/env ...?

> Also, if I send scripts to other RH users, will there be issues
> (in particular with RH8, since that is still widely used)?

Well, I don't know what the default Python release is on RH8. You may
want to consider exactly that particular trick (/usr/bin/env ...) to
ensure that a suitably up-to-date Python release is used to run your
code on RH8. Certainly, I'd regard that as a better alternative than
adding explicit tests in every program or getting those users to
install Python into a different prefix (/usr/local) and then to manage
their paths, although you could help with some shell scripts, I
suppose.

Paul