On Thu, 24 Oct 2013, Jed Brown wrote: > Satish Balay <[email protected]> writes: > > > Do you know if archlinux will switch over to using the guideline from > > python.org? > > The guideline does not prohibit Arch from doing what they did (3 years > ago).
Yeah - it appears guideline came up in response to what archlinux did - and that broke stuff. It says: - all distributions should ensure that python refers to the same target as python2. - but archlinux doesn't do this. So users should use 'python2' But then - as you said - python 2.4 doesn't provide python2 > It says that scripts should use "python2" if they will only work > for python-2.x and use "python" if they work for both python-2.x (x=6 or > 7 in practice) and 3.y. > > > We are currently using python version from RHEL as a guideline. RHEL5 > > has python 2.4 with eol in march-2017. > > > > And I see RHEL6 has python-2.6 > > Python-2.5 was released in 2006, so this is more than 10 years. We're > not very tolerant of PETSc users that are still using petsc-2.1.2. This comparision is not fair. Configure is supporsed to be as-portable-as-reasonably possible. We don't impose the same thing to petsc [i.e all new versions of petsc should be backward compatible with old versions] Satish > > This is not to say we have to drop support right away, but python-2.4 is > getting quite old and forces us to use a number of more fragile > constructs. We may have trouble holding out until 2017. >
