[Zope3-dev] Re: Requiring Python 2.3

[Tres Seaver]

On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 07:13, Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Tim Peters wrote:
> >  Since the 19 months of Python 2.3 development after 2.2 was released
> > went by without stamping 2.2, and now a few more months have gone by and
> > 2.3.1 is out (2.3.1 was released Wednesday), it makes a whole lot of sense
> > on many counts to skip the Python 2.2 line.
> 
> On the other hand this amount of time has allowed 2.2 to filter through to
> all kinds of Linux distributions and a lot of modules to be available for
> it. 2.3 hasn't had that time yet. Then again, it wouldn't matter that much
> for a typical Zope 2 setup, as either a binary python is included or the
> situation is so complex that maintaining a self-compiled python 2.3 version
> is of a minimal concern.
> 
> We'd need to ask on Zope 2 related lists to be sure this is true, though.

Running Zope in production with the OS-supplied Python is too risky for
my taste, anyway;  the distribution's packagers routinely configure it
without taking into account what Zope needs (for instance, RedHat 9
comes configured with 4-byte Unicode, which is horrendously
space-inefficient for long-running processes which don't actually use
non-Latin Unicode).

Worse, that Python is likely to get "upgraded" by the sysadmin without
any evaluation of the impact to Zope, so even the fact that your
'/usr/bin/python' happens to be sane today doesn't provide any guarantee
that it will work tomorrow.  Better to have an '/opt/zope/bin/python'
(or wherever you prefer) which is Zope-specific.

Tres.
-- 
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Tres Seaver                                tseaver at zope.com
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