[Bf-committers] solving the issues of switching to python 2.4 on Os X for next release

[Stephen Swaney]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 08:15:12PM -0300, Willian Padovani Germano wrote:

> Thanks to all the info shared, we see that OS X, Irix, FreeBSD and some 
> Linux installations (depends on distros and also on users -- some have 
> newer installs, others don't) are not prepared for Python 2.4.
> 
> I guess we should officially stay with 2.3 -- and use it in all 
> platforms which have issues with 2.4.

I would respectfully disagree with this.  Most of the world has moved
to 2.4.  There are some exceptions as we have seen:

- OSX seems to be a complete mishmash of versions and incompatibilites
- SGI seems to be stuck at 2.2 judging from the SGI freeware page
- Debian Linux, know for its stability and its old packages is lagging
behind as always.
- some subset of *BSD seems to have a problem which is unclear.

However:
- The major linux distros like Redhat/Fedora, Ubuntu and Suse support
2.4.  
- Windows can use 2.4
- afaik, Solaris is ok with 2.4
- Anyone installing Python from python.org will most likely end up with
2.4
- Anyone compiling blender from source can use 2.4

The issues of slow-to-upgrade/incompatible platforms will never go 
away.  We *will* have the same discussion when Python 2.5 comes out.

I think the best way to deal with this is the same way we deal 
with Windows now - include our own distribution of Python 2.4
with enough modules to run our distributed scripts on our 'exceptional'
platforms.

If needed, we can make Blender builds against Py 2.3 available.

-- 
Stephen Swaney			
sswaney at centurytel.net