Jason Tackaberry wrote: > Kevin Dangoor wrote: > > I'm curious as to why people are still running 2.3. The upgrade from > > 2.3 to 2.4 doesn't really break things, right? So why stick with 2.3? > > I'm presently evaluating TurboGears for an upcoming project and I must > confess that, coming from the lead developer, this statement has given > me pause. > > The two big commercial class distros (SuSE Enterprise and RHEL) are > both packaged with python 2.3. Manually upgrading the system install > of python to 2.4 on these distros is an invitation to disaster. > Maintaining a parallel install of python 2.4 is certainly possible, but > it makes me very wary. That's something I do on development boxes, not > production servers.
Do you never build an RPM for something your distro doesn't offer? That seems like an odd stance to take. Note that Python itself uses a well-defined naming and versioning scheme for its installation to allow different versions to happily co-exist. If you use "make altinstall" to build your Python 2.4 package, it will give you a "python2.4" binary but not a "python" binary, leaving your system Python entirely unaffected. Similarly, libraries go to prefix/lib/python2.4 instead of python2.3, etc. On at least one machine I administer, I have a system Python that's Python 2.2, and an altinstalled 2.3 and 2.4. Then, vendor-provided stuff uses 2.2, and my things run with 2.3 or 2.4, depending on their needs. In my last "enterprise" shop, we couldn't rely on getting anything particularly current on our app servers from RHEL, so our apps were built using the NetBSD pkgsrc system to build our own Python versions and their dependencies, as well as the applications themselves. We then simply managed those separate packages, rendering unto the SA's what was RHEL's, and unto our apps what was our application platform. :) So, in short, I'd encourage you to simply consider Python 2.4 part of your application platform, and the system Python as merely part of the operating system. There's no need to mix the two, and many reasons *not* to mix them even if they did happen to be the same version. Whether you use the same packaging system for your application platform and your OS is also a decision that's up to you as an application designer. The boxes are there to serve you, so you can serve the users; your app doesn't exist to serve the boxes' system administrators or Red Hat, unless of course you're writing system administrator applications for Red Hat. :)
