Re: GNOME 2.20 Python version

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 17:38 +0000, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
> On Ter, 2007-03-13 at 16:57 +0100, Lo�Minier wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 13, 2007, Elijah Newren wrote:
> > > Unlike GNOME and Linux, Python does not use odd version numbers for
> > > development versions.  Thus 2.5 is the latest production version of
> > > Python, rather than the latest development version.
> > 
> >  I know 2.5 is a stable release; my point is that this needlessly raises
> >  the bar to build GNOME: anyone is free to build GNOME with whatever
> >  version of libc6, gcc, or python that one wants to catch some bugs (in
> >  GNOME or in these projects), but imposing the python version to be so
> >  high by default seems a gratuitous change.  3 out of 5 Ubuntu releases
> >  do not have Python 2.5 by default, no Debian release has it and the
> >  next one wont have it.
> 
>   I am not proposing that GNOME modules using Python should require a
> minimum Python version of 2.5.  I am only proposing that "jhbuild
> bootstrap" install the python 2.5 tarball instead of python 2.4.  The
> effect of this change is:
> 
>   1. We start putting more emphasis on testing GNOME-over-python2.5
> rather than GNOME-over-python2.4 (the latter has already been
> extensively tested over the years, while the former hasn't);
> 
>   2. We require that GNOME modules using Python make an effort to work
> on Python 2.5, in addition to Python 2.4.
> 
>   I think primarily it's a matter of which version of python we prefer
> to test.  I say we test GNOME with python 2.5 because it's the new
> stable version of python and python 2.4 is not maintained any more.

If a program works correctly with Python 2.4, is there
actually a danger of it not working correctly with 2.5?
That sounds broken.

I worry that this move would result in programmers using
2.5-only features.  Our intrepid testers wouldn't notice,
because they're building from jhbuild.  But we'd create
an effective 2.5 dependency that our distributors would
have to deal with.

--
Shaun