From owner-freebsd-ports Wed Sep 6 9: 3:39 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from fling.sanbi.ac.za (fling.sanbi.ac.za [196.38.142.119]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ACBB837B422 for ; Wed, 6 Sep 2000 09:03:33 -0700 (PDT) Received: from johann by fling.sanbi.ac.za with local (Exim 3.13 #4) id 13Whfd-0004dE-00 for ports@freebsd.org; Wed, 06 Sep 2000 18:03:29 +0200 Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 18:03:29 +0200 From: Johann Visagie To: ports@freebsd.org Subject: How are future Python ports going to be handled? Message-ID: <20000906180329.D16551@fling.sanbi.ac.za> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2i Sender: owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Seems the Python people pulled a fast one on the whole world, probably to get around the licensing restrictions surrounding the Python 1.6 tree. In one day they moved 1.6 to final release, and released Python 2.0b1. Problem is, at each stage from 1.5.2 to 1.6 to 2.0b1 there's code breakage involved. (Reminiscent of the days when everyone had both perl4 and perl5 installed). I'm involved in a development project which uses Python, and we're faced with the problem of which version to base our development on. It's not even possible to work in a "1.5.2" subset of 2.0, since (for example) the string object changed significantly. It occurs to me that the FreeBSD port(s) of Python could also be in for a shake-up. Currently there is: lang/python (1.5.2) lang/python-beta (1.6b1) There's so much breakage involved in going from 1.5.2 to 1.6 that I personally wouldn't think it's advisable to update the lang/python port to 1.6 straight away. Maybe we'll be faced with the less-than-ideal situation where we'll have multiple ports installing multiple versions, with (possibly) multiple binary names(?) Just wondering... -- Johann To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message