Python 3 adoption

Posted Apr 16, 2015 12:40 UTC (Thu) by lgeorget (guest, #99972)
In reply to: Python 3 adoption by NAR
Parent article: Python 3 adoption

>On Windows I can expect a 10 years old binary (effectively unmaintained code) working on a current version, on Linux I can't expect the same code working during the 6-12 months lifecycle of a distribution! And many people think it's fine.

Actually, you run into some problems and have to use the "compatibility parameters" (and cross fingers) if you want to run a 10-years-old software under Windows. And if it does not run into dependencies problems, that's because every software will usually come with all the DLLs it needs when you download it from Internet. You can easily have ten times the same "shared library" scattered around deep inside C:\Programs under Windows. So, I don't think you can actually compare Windows and Linux on that point.

As an Computer Science PhD student, I sometimes need to make old unmaintained code to run (such as prototypes, or obscure libraries) and I usually succeed. I admit it can be a bit cumbersome to fetch and compile by hand a lot of libraries to meet the dependency of a software but you can do it.

Python 3 adoption

Posted Apr 16, 2015 14:47 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

You can easily have ten times the same "shared library" scattered around deep inside C:\Programs under Windows

So what? C:\Program Files* uses 13GB out of the 500 GB disk on the computer I'm typing this. That's less than 3%. Should I care? I don't think so. Again, the difference is that on Windows you can expect that 10 years old binary will work, on Linux you shouldn't expect that unmaintained code will work in a year.

Computer Science PhD student [...] I usually succeed

I think it would be a shame if you don't :-) But it is one thing to fetch and compile dependencies for an academic project and a completely other thing is to figure out why some software broke after an apt-get upgrade on a live system...