John Nagle wrote: > Victor Kryukov wrote: > > > > Our main requirement for tools we're going to use is rock-solid > > stability. As one of our team-members puts it, "We want to use tools > > that are stable, has many developer-years and thousands of user-years > > behind them, and that we shouldn't worry about their _versions_." The
When settling on an environment you need to have a clear strategy about component versions and compatibility. Although Python provides a fairly reasonable backwards compatibility story, one still needs to be aware of changes between versions and their implications, but this is the case for a large proportion of the software produced today. Despite the baggage maintained by Microsoft so that ancient applications might still run in recent versions of Windows, to choose a fairly extreme example in certain respects, there are still many things to be aware of when maintaining or upgrading your environment. Saying that something needs "Python plus Windows/Linux plus some database system" isn't going to be enough if you're emphasizing stability. > > main reason for that is that we want to debug our own bugs, but not > > the bugs in our tools. > > You may not be happy with Python, then. > > Having spent the last several months implementing a reasonably complex > web site in Python, I now have an understanding of the problems involved. > Which are non-trivial. I'm sure they are, which is why I attempt to use the tools and services available to reduce the impact of those problems on myself. > Some key web site components, like the SSL interface and the > MySQL interface, are written in C and maintained by third parties, > often by a single person. Getting the correct version for your > platform and making it work can be difficult. Getting the right > versions of MySQL, OpenSSL, and Python to all play together is > non-trivial. Expect to have to build from source, debug the build > process, look at source repositories, submit bug reports, fix > library bugs yourself, and maintain a local set of library patches. I think we went through this before, but to what extent did you rely on your distribution to handle many of these issues? Or was this on Windows? If so, you're the master of your own distribution rather than a group of helpful people who've probably already done most of that work. > Few hosting companies will have these modules available for you. > It's not like Perl or PHP, where it works out of the box. WebFaction > claims to support Python well, but few other hosting companies bother. > Most Linux distributions ship with older versions of Python, and > that's what most hosting companies will give you. Python 2.4 > is par for the course. There's nothing wrong with Python 2.4. Perhaps you've inadvertently highlighted an issue with the Python community: that everyone wants the latest and greatest, and sees the CPython distribution as the primary means of delivering it. If so, you've just included yourself in the group causing yourself all those problems described above. Paul P.S. The inquirer may wish to visit sites representing the different frameworks in order to seek testimonials, and to look for sites using those frameworks in order to assess their popularity. Zope, Plone, Django, TurboGears, Webware and many others have delivered high- profile sites at various times, as far as I recall. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list