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Two Python versions

Posted Dec 1, 2009 19:25 UTC (Tue) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
Parent article: Between Fedora 12 and 13

The current plan is to package Python 3 in a way that allows it to be installed alongside Python 2.6 without interference between the two

Why is it feasible to do this now, when the maintainers said that it was completely infeasible to package both Python 2.4 and 2.5 without interference when 2.5 appeared?

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Two Python versions

Posted Dec 1, 2009 23:53 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

It wasn't impossible. It was just difficult. Python 2 and Python 3 are going to have to remain in parallel as incompatible languages for a long time to come and this made it feasible for someone to volunteer to get the work done. It is cost vs benefit equation.

Two Python versions

Posted Dec 2, 2009 19:10 UTC (Wed) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]

I'm still not convinced it's workable, and have said so in the BZ (I'm the previous python Fedora maintainer). But the new python maintainer disagrees, it's his problem so he gets to decide his way.

However there are also a couple of "advantages" this time around:

1. They are _just_ doing python3 for F13, no extra modules. This cuts both ways, it won't be useful for much (IMO) ... but it also shouldn't break much.

2. python3 is _vastly_ different to python2, so people won't mind as much if Fedora ends up treating them as two separate languages that happen to end/start in close proximity.

3. The python maintainer is doing it full time, so if the world blows up he might have the time to fix everything.

Two Python versions

Posted Dec 13, 2009 18:06 UTC (Sun) by AdamW (guest, #48457) [Link]

"I'm still not convinced it's workable"

That's odd, seeing as how Mandriva had python 2.4 and python 2.5 parallel installed for multiple releases. Hell, it _still_ has python 2.4 available in Mandriva 2010, alongside 2.6. I'm not aware of it ever having blown up the world in all that time.