On 06/14/2012 09:24 PM, Eric Ongerth wrote:
Seems unnecessarily scary to newcomers to mention compiling your own
Python early in the docs, even if we know it's no big deal.
Particularly when the main concern at hand (that many people's system
instance of python tends to be a poor choice for their Pyramid
development) is easily and almost trivially solved by using a
virtualenv.
It would be unnecessarily scary if it was unncessary, but like I
mentioned in the text included in this email it is effectively necessary
on some platforms.
Would it not be enough to simply phrase the
recommendation of using a virtualenv in fairly strong terms? With a
reference to a deeper document location that discusses the compile-yer-
own-python approach for those interested.
No, it's a separate issue.
- C
- Eric
On Jun 13, 6:21 am, Chris McDonough<chr...@plope.com> wrote:
On 06/12/2012 06:36 PM, Wade Leftwich wrote:
With the Pyramid docs in ebook form on my phone I tend to browse them
at odd times. Today, standing in line at the post office, I stopped at
this paragraph right near the beginning:
"""
It s useful to use a Python interpreter that isn t the system Python
interpreter to develop your software. The authors of Pyramid tend not
to use the system Python for development purposes; always a self-
compiled one. Compiling Python is usually easy, and often the system
Python is compiled with options that aren t optimal for web
development.
"""
... and wondered what the best compilation options for web development
might be. I generally use whatever comes with Ubuntu, which seems to
work OK. Does anyone have config tips to share?
That wording should probably be revisited because you're not the first
to ask. More accurate is the statement "it's a real pain in the ass
when someone walks into IRC and gives us a Python compilation scenario
that can only be replicated with their particular OS/platform combination".
This tends to happen all the time on Mac, in particular, and fairly
often on Ubuntu as well. This is usually because OS vendors tend to
actually use the system Python and consider it more "part of the OS"
than a development tool for third-party developers. OS vendors don't
compile Python for usage by you; they compile it and configure it for
usage by themselves. Their requirements may not be yours.
I don't use a Mac anymore, but when I did, and when I tried to help
people get things running on their system Python, I was continually
surprised by the number of things that went wrong and the amount of time
people would spend trying to fix them without just compiling and
installing another Python. If I sat down at a machine and tried to make
the system Python work with Pyramid, with enough time and effort, I
probably could. But someone new to Python probably could not, at least
within a reasonable amount of time, and in that case, it's literally
easier to just compile another one.
There's not one cause; each combination of Python version/OS
version/platform combination tends to have its own set of endearing
niggles that aren't much fun. In general, it's just a shortcut to
consider the "system" Python the domain of the OS vendor and compile
your own Python for your own work to shortcut all the potential landmines.
For example, Python on Ubuntu has the following default sys.path:
Python 2.7.3 (default, Apr 20 2012, 22:39:59)
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys
>>> sys.path
['', '/usr/lib/python2.7', '/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-linux2',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk', '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload',
'/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gst-0.10',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0',
'/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntu-sso-client',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-client',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-control-panel',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-couch',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-installer',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-storage-protocol']
Note the inclusion of Ubuntu-specific locations by default. This isn't
a problem unless you don't use a virtualenv. But some (insanely) don't.
I've seen some weird things happen as the result of these nonstandard
dirs being included on sys.path by default in any case.
The system Python on Ubuntu (and many other Linux distros) is also
compiled with UCS4 Unicode, which effectively doubles the space required
in memory for each Unicode string without much benefit, as the 99% case
for webapps doesn't include characters outside the UCS2 range (at least
if those webapps don't use Asian scripts).
- C
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