Re: Proposed Modules, My Take

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 09:54 +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
> Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 
> >API basically equals ABI in Python terms.  Python *does* break both for
> >Python apps (features deprecated in 2.2 are removed in 2.3, and so on).
> >The Python version is also a lot like a library soname.  Imagine if
> >GNOME said that libxml is guaranteed to be available, and is guaranteed
> >to have a particular API, the symbols/behavior won't change, but it
> >might be called libxml.so.1 on one machine and libxml.so.30 on another.
> >Even though the API didn't change you are still then forced to recompile
> >your app for every target distro - that's especially silly when you're
> >using an interpreted language like Python.
> >  
> >
> Could you please bring up some real examples of the breakage you are 
> worried about, rather than hypothetical situations?

http://python.org/doc/2.4/whatsnew/node15.html
http://python.org/doc/2.3.4/whatsnew/node22.html
http://python.org/doc/2.2.3/whatsnew/node12.html

Admittedly, mostly minor.  Those don't include (I think) any standard
library changes.  They also don't cover all breakages; the entire
release notes should be checked in depth for changes.  Python 2.1 had
some bigger breakages.  There appears to be nothing in the Python
development policy that states similar breakages won't occur in Python
2.5/2.6/etc.

One of the biggest issues is simply getting a Python app to actually
run.  When the app invokes python-2.3 but only python-2.4 is installed
the app simply won't start.  But you can't just start "python" because
of the possible incompatibilities, and because the python started by
"python" might not be one with PyGTK installed in a machine with
multiple Python versions.