G'day, Gregor's already answered most of these, but thought I'd throw in a comment or two.
On Sun, Oct 28, 2001 at 12:11:04AM -0500, Chris Lawrence wrote: > On Oct 27, Gregor Hoffleit wrote: > > I've put a version 0.3.6 of the Python Policy Draft on > > http://people.debian.org/~flight/python/. The version is still a little > > bit rough and sometimes incomplete, but it already gives a good outline > > of the Python packaging system we are installing just now. > > > > Please have a look at the document, and post all fundamental problems > > you have with the content. > > > > If nobody find fundamental show-stoppers that render this unusable, > > we're going to submit it to Debian Policy very soon. > > My main concern is that the policy seems to force the installation of > the default version to use anything in the distribution that uses > python... a few comments, focusing on section 2: This is not entirely true... it depends on what modules your application depends on and how the packagers have chosen to package them. If you are lucky, pythonX.Y-<module> packages (or a version independant 2.1.3/2. package) for all of them exist, in which case you can choose any version X.Y for which all the required packages exist. Note that the policy allows you to create your own pythonX.Y-<foo> packages if the existing python-<foo> mantainer chose not to create them. Note you will have to invoke /usr/bin/pythonX.Y, as without the default python package installed /usr/bin/python won't exist. > - If a package works with any version of Python in the archive, is > there a setup that allows users to choose which version of Python they > want to have installed? Or are they stuck with the default version? I might be confusing things a bit here... do you mean an application package, or a module package? For module packages, users can specify what version to use in their own scripts with an appropriate "#!/usr/bin/pythonX.Y". For application packages, the user is bound to whatever version of Python the packager chose. This can be a particular version using "Depends: pythonX.Y" and "#!/usr/bin/pythonX.Y", or the default using "Depends: python" and "#!/usr/bin/python". Note that a packager _can_ give the end user some degree of control over what version of python is used by using "#!/usr/bin/env python". This allows the end user to put whatever they like as python in /usr/local/bin. However, this is risky as it bypasses all the dependancy checking. I suspect that package mantainers using this trick will stop after a few bug reports from people installing beta's in their own /usr/local :-) > - Should 2.1.1 require python-foo to provide pythonX.Y-foo? probably a good idea. I can see no reason not to, and allows packages to depend on pythonX.Y, pythonX.Y-foo so that they can still work when python and python-foo are upgraded, and a backwards compatible pythonX.Y-foo released. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ABO: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for more info, including pgp key ----------------------------------------------------------------------