Status of Python 2.6 transition

[Luca Falavigna]

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Fellow developers, interested contributors,

as you know, Jaunty will ship Python 2.6 by default. New version brought
several changes in the structure of the Ubuntu Python stack, Matthias
already summarised them very well [1].

Efforts to make Jaunty compatible with Python 2.6 have been made so far,
but as of today we still have about 100 source packages to be adjusted
(most of them in universe). For a list of packages which need love, you
could use edos-debcheck and some UNIX tools. To speed up things,
edos-debckeck output is alredy stored online [2], so you can execute the
following commands in your favourite terminal and start working:

~$ wget http://gaspa.yattaweb.it/issues/edos/jaunty/i386/edos_jaunty.raw
~$ cat edos_jaunty.raw | grep "< 2.6" | cut -d" " -f3 | xargs apt-cache
showsrc | grep Package | cut -d" " -f2 | sort -du

This will list uninstallable packages only. It's just a subset of the
total number of affected packages, but this can be of help to discover
more issues related to Python 2.6.

To transition a package, a rebuild could be sufficient in most cases,
sometimes it is necessary to make adjustments to debian/rules or
debian/*.install files to follow new packaging requirements:
* Be sure to not install files in /usr/local (pass --install-layout=deb
 to "setup.py install" for distutils managed packages)
* Be sure to ship modules in /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/dist-packages

/usr/share/python/python.mk (from python package) has several macros to
easily manage this job, be sure to have a look at its contents and use
its macros when appropriate.

[1]https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2009-February/027439.html
[2]http://gaspa.yattaweb.it/issues/edos/

- --
 . ''`.      Luca Falavigna
 : :'  :  Ubuntu MOTU Developer
 `. `'`     Debian Maintainer
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