A plea for Python 2.3

[Mike Meyer]

On May 28, 2009, at 16:17, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:

> 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.

SSL is probably there as well. The problem is that you have to have  
the appropriate -dev packages for the python configure to find so  
these will build.

        <mike