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

Marius Gedminas mgedmin at b4net.lt
Tue May 22 07:11:22 EDT 2007


On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 12:21:42PM -0400, Tres Seaver wrote:
> Reinoud van Leeuwen wrote:
> > On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 10:39:22AM -0400, Fred Drake wrote:
> > 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).

That's probably the best reason.  I ran away from Debian's Zope 2.x
packages because they made upgrades painful.

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

Do you have any numbers?  How much memory of a typical Zope 3 app is
taken by Unicode strings?  (I'm not trying to invalidate your argument,
I'm genuinely curious.)

>  - 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).

I don't think that's a good example.  I'd rather patch Zope in this
particular case.

>  - 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.

There's still a point where you stop, right?  You don't have a
self-compiled libc and a self-compiled C compiler to make sure your
self-compiled Pythons are really identical?

Marius Gedminas
-- 
If you sat a monkey down in front of a keyboard, the first thing typed would be
a unix command.
                -- Bill Lye
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