> On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 20:03, Ian Bicking wrote:
> 
> It's a pity that Redhat are shipping such an old version by default,
> presumably because newer versions break their scripts. 
> 

I for one appreciate the approach of maintaining backward compatibility with
python applications.  

The convention with shared libraries is to include the version number in the
filename so that things which depend on the older version will not break.  

Likewise, I think python should do the same thing.  RH's approach gives the
most flexibility, and provides the highest level of compatibility with older
apps.  When you upgrade your application to use python version 2, then  you
change it to invoke python2.  

It is an easier kluge for Joe Newbie to fix a Mandrake system (ln -s python
python2) to use this strategy than for him to fix a RedHat system by
creating a special python2 subdirectory in the path and updating the path
prior to invocation.

Having my existing python applications work after upgrading the OS is a good
thing. Think about non-programmers trying to upgrade and then running into
this problem.  If we want to see these tools grow in the main-stream, we
need to keep in mind smoothe upgrade paths.

I vote for using the name "python2" and if we suddenly require python2.2
then changing the name again.  It makes for a seamless solution for a large
number of platforms, and ISP users, and makes for a very simple (ie: ln -s
python python2) for everyone else.

As for the Windows crowd, they don't seem to have the same convention about
a common executable path (ie: /usr/local/bin) that we typically have in *nix
land.  So I am not sure it is worth changing the *.bat files to use
"python2" rather than "python". 

Just my nibble's worth of thought...

-Stuart-


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