A plea for Python 2.3

[Fredrik Lundh]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 7:56 PM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:

>> I ask because many of us enterprise types are using RHEL4 ("it ain't
>> broke, so they aren't fixing it") which ships with Python
>> 2.3.something.  And I will need 967 fix (support for pushing to https
>> through a proxy), which means upgrading to Mercurial <next> when it is
>> released.
>
> Well the trade-off inherent in getting seven years of stability from a
> distro is that you don't get new features.
>
> But if you're already installing Mercurial on such machines, it should
> be fairly straightforward to package a Python 2.6 install as well. The
> easiest way is to make a build Python 2.6 that installs into /usr/local/
> as python26. Then running python26 setup.py will adjust hg to use that
> Python. Then you can tar up Mercurial 1.3 and Python 2.6 in one tarball
> that you unpack in /.

Lazy/silly question: does Mercurial depend on any Python extension
that's not included in the standard Python tarball?

I.e. is building Python 2.6 with "./configure; make altinstall"
followed by building Mercurial with "python2.6 setup.py install"
pretty much guaranteed to produce a complete installation?

</F>