[Zope3-dev] Re: System python for *development*? (Was: 3.3.0 tag broken by zc.catalog eggs?)

[Tres Seaver]

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Reinoud van Leeuwen wrote:
> On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 10:39:22AM -0400, Fred Drake wrote:
>> On 5/21/07, Gary Poster <gary at zope.com> wrote:
>>> I then
>>> feel comfortable sharing the dev Python across builds because I know
>>> it is clean.
>> The stuff that gets installed in the system Python's is usually not an
>> issue for Zope applications (I've never had a Zope-related issue with
>> those things), but I always use a clean Python just to be safe in case
>> something odd gets added to the system Python.  Ubuntu and the various
>> RedHat-derived systems (Fedora, CentOS) add enough to the system
>> Python that I'd rather avoid them for applications regardless.
> 
> I think developers and system- or application maintainers have different 
> viewpoints in this.
> 
> As a developer it might be a good idea to have different installed pythons 
> in different environments to be sure that some modules (or python itself) 
> meet different requirements. 
> 
> But as system maintainer I like to keep things simple. I do not want 
> similar trees of python installations all over the place if it can 
> be avoided. 

Just as with Java-based applications:  if the server's job includes
running Zope, then installing a separate Python interpreter is a pretty
low cost, with the following benefits:

 - You don't risk breaking your production Zope application in a
   distro-mandated upgrade to Python (e.g., Fedora 7 puts Python 2.5
   into /usr/bin/python).

 - You may not want to pay the cost of a Python optimized for desktop
   applications (UCS-4, anyone?)

 - You may need to patch Python to work around a bug which is only
   problemnatic for long-running Python instances (e.g., the
   longstanding cgi.FieldStorage DoS problem).

 - You can create a repeatable environment for testing each deployed
   application, even where those applications are running on boxes
   with different OS / distro-supplied Pythons.


Tres.
- --
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Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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