Re: Proposed Modules, My Take

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 21:07 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 14:58 -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > New versions must not break ABI.  While PyGTK itself does not break, it
> > does heavily depend on the ABI of Python and that *does* break.  It's
> > like saying it's alright if GTK+ is stable but glib can be unstable.
> > Unless each release of GNOME has a standard Python version that must be
> > available with that release, PyGTK would be breaking the spirit of the
> > rules, if not the exact letter of the rules.
> 
> The application must specify the version of python. If not then the
> application is choosing not to use a stable ABI.

Right.  The problem is that the application has no idea _which_ version
of Python to specify.  Two systems both running the same version of
GNOME and the same version of PyGTK could have different versions of
Python installed.  Or one system could have two versions of Python, with
only one of them having the PyGTK stuff.  How does an application know
which one to pick?  It knows it's developed against GNOME/PyGTK 2.10,
and that's it.  If you specify, "GNOME 2.10 shall use Python 2.2," then
the application author also knows which version of Python to specify and
the app will work on all GNOME 2.10-compliant boxes.

If GNOME does not specify a version of Python than the entire existence
of PyGTK in the Bindings becomes quite useless as a developer can't
reliably use them.  Why even bother putting PyGTK in Bindings if
developers can't rely on their app actually working?  They're still
going to rely on individual distros, which is the exact same situation
you had before putting PyGTK in Bindings.

> If the application does specify a version of python, then pygtk is not
> going to break the application by releasing a newer version.
>