compat-python, Zope...

[Oliver Falk]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> 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!
[ ... ]
> We don't ship multiple versions of Xorg because a new version of Xorg
> breaks some driver, instead we fix drivers.

You cannot run multiple versions of Xorg....

 > We don't ship multiple
> versions of apache because apache2 broke some modules. 

Well. I had a lot of mod_perl 1.x apps and so had apache 1.3 running on 
Fedora for a long time. Until I finally fixed *my* apps to work with 
mod_perl 2.x. I know a few more people who (still) have the same problem 
and therefore a similar setup I had. So even for apache it would have 
made sense to provide compat packages. But it seems nobody worried about 
the Admins and the Developers...

I can remember similar problems with php 4 -> 5... I had a few cases 
where php 5 didn't work with some OSS, but these where fixed quite fast 
and I only had to wait for a short while (less than half a year) until I 
was able to upgrade to the next Fedora version.

It (Fedora) is sometimes only a just-get-the-latest-stuff into the 
latest-distribution. Which actually sometimes is nice, but sometimes 
break things horrible!

 > <insert
> infinitely long list of other such things we don't support>.  Why should
> python be *any* different for zope/plone?

Well. Why do we have tomcat 5.x and tomcat 6.x? :-P
Ah, because there might be some enterprise customers who actually have 
enterprise applications running with tomcat 5 and are not compatible 
with tomcat 6?

I *do* have experience with this as well. In my former company, we had 
tomcat 5 and had to put much effort in 'porting' our application to 
tomcat 6. I'm not sure if the application has been finally migrated or 
not... Maybe not and it still runs with Tomcat 5.
I do know some other Tomcat app, that didn't even work with Tomcat 4 and 
we had to package (on some RHEL system) tomcat 3.

Can you imagine the fun?

And back to Zope. I know of some really large enterprise company (known 
especially from selling books) - located in Germany - who actually use 
Zope for their intranet. I guess they are not going to update any time 
soon, but if they decide to upgrade their base OS, they have to install 
python + deps manually from tarball and since we have new DB4, that will 
not be easy. BUT *we* do already have the patches, so why don't we want 
our users (and RH customers) use packages, if the man power to provide 
the packages is within the community?
Actually I don't know if they are RH customers or Fedora users...

> [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.

Yes. Of course we are going to have a long tail of extra packages for 
the compat packages...


Final statement:
If we believe that there are users and (especially!) customers out there 
who actually use old crap, we should provide them with the old crap 
instead of let them alone. Because else they are either never upgrading 
to a new distribution until they are forced by _whatever_ or change 
distribution.

OK. My thinking is more a RH thinking, than a Fedora thinking, because 
I'm actually afraid of loosing RH customers and not that much afraid of 
loosing Fedora userbase... Sorry.

-of