A plea for Python 2.3

[Matt Mackall]

On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 22:10 +0200, Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> 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?

Yes and no. Mercurial depends on a couple things that are simultaneously
advertised in the standard Python library and apparently not built by
default, zlib support being the example that comes immediately to mind.
This is a fairly common trap for people building their own Python.

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