compat-python, Zope...

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 09:53 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 15.10.2008 09:17, Oliver Falk wrote:
> Back then we tried our best to get compat-python directly into Fedora, 
> but those efforts failed. Hence Livna accepted compat-python (and hence 
> it made its way to RPM Fusion). But I'm all for moving compat-python* to 
> Fedora, so I really appreciate your efforts Oliver!

I am still very very much against the existence of a compat-python* in
Fedora.  I'll even go a step further and say that the existence of such
in rpmfusion/livna has actually hurt things rather than helped.  Since
rpmfusion/livna has carried this package, there has continued to be no
impetus on the Zope people to actually move forward to a modern version
of python.  We had this discussion *OVER* a year ago and at the time a
compat-python was "just going to be for a release".  Yet more than a
year later, the situation is exactly the same.  And actually, it's worse
now because people have realized that just base python isn't enough --
they need base python plus some set of modules that they care about.
And another group of people will need another set of packages for their
zope/plone deployment[1].  In three years, are we still going to need a
compat-python2.4 for zope/plone in 3 years because, as was mentioned,
we'll be going to python 2.6 in Fedora 11 and python 3 at an unspecified
point beyond that and if python 2.5 is this much trouble, 2.6 and 3 are
going to be far worse.

We don't ship multiple versions of Xorg because a new version of Xorg
breaks some driver, instead we fix drivers.  We don't ship multiple
versions of apache because apache2 broke some modules.  <insert
infinitely long list of other such things we don't support>.  Why should
python be *any* different for zope/plone?

Jeremy

[1] Want to have your zope and plone instances auth to FAS?  Guess you
need python-fedora now...  How about openid?  There's a different module
there.  Etc.