Switch to Python 2.4?

[John A Meinel]

Aaron Bentley wrote:
> John A Meinel wrote:
>
>>>As a quick aside the current weave code is 2.4 only. You are using
>>>generator comprehensions, which do not exist in 2.3
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> It seems like Python 2.4 has something for everyone.  It introduces
> generator expressions, @-syntax decorators and the subprocess module. It
> improves unittest and difflib.
>
> All major distros offer Python 2.4 in their latest releases, so
> it should be available to most people.  Having a single target for
> compatibility would reduce the number of accidental breakages.  Is there
> any reason we shouldn't require 2.4 for bzr?
>

I would love to only use the latest version of python. However, I can't
say for sure that python2.4 is in all major distros. I'm having a friend
get back to me with RedHat AS4, I'm sure it isn't in Redhat AS3 (which
actually only has python2.2.3).

I know that Mac OSX 10.3 (and 10.4) only includes python 2.3, though you
can get "official unofficial" binary installers for 2.4.1 from
http://undefined.org/python/

On windows, they are about the same. Both are binary downloadable
installers so if someone installed 2.3 they pretty much can just install
2.4.

For cygwin, 2.4 has been available for a while (cygwin tends to be a
more dev-based distribution).

The biggest reason is trying to have it "just work" for as many people
as possible. I would almost say that the major developers (you, myself,
Martin) should actually stick to using 2.3 for development, since it is
almost guaranteed to be upwards compatible. (With the caveat that we can
install the subprocess module :)

But using 2.4 would be a nice indulgence. I have done some work to have
a compatibility layer to run my 2.3 code on 2.2 (__import__ generators,
os.walk, logging module, etc), since at work we ran AS3 servers. Though
they convinced themselves it was worth upgrading to 2.3.
The problem is that the syntax changes in 2.4 are not possible to make
compatible with 2.3.

> After all, one of the reasons we're using Python is because it makes
> life easier for the developers, and Python 2.4 would make it easier still.
>
> Aaron

I agree 100%, 2.4 would be nicer to work in.

John
=:->
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