[PATCH] Use best available python version

Martin Pool mbp at sourcefrog.net
Tue May 31 09:03:38 BST 2005


On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 12:06 +0100, Dafydd Harries wrote:

> > But then why wouldn't a distribution which has both 2.3 and 2.4 make 2.4
> > the default?  Perhaps they don't trust 2.4?  I think early debian 2.4
> > pythons didn't work well.
> 
> The reason is twofold:
> 
>  - Each Python release is not 100% compatible with previous releases, so
>    changing the default version will likely cause bugs to appear in
>    programs which use the default version. (I.e. they refer to
>    /usr/bin/python rather than /usr/bin/python2.x.)
> 
>  - Most Python packages in Debian have a version for each version of in
>    Debian. This is particularly important for those which contain C
>    code. It takes time for each package maintainer to add support for a
>    new version of Python. Hence, during the transition to a new version,
>    there might be (for example) an ElementTree package for Python 2.3
>    but not for version 2.4.

Right, I think this particular case has recently occurred -- and it
seems like a reason that we should trust the distribution's default
Python, otherwise we might get one without a cElementTree, and that is
therefore slower....

-- 
Martin






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