[lsb-discuss] ISV Survey- Perl,Python

[Stew Benedict]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007, Robert Schweikert wrote:

> Cool, I think this is getting more useful now. However, there is still a 
> catch we have to answer/resolve.
> 
> The spec says Python 2.4 or later. While I understand that the LSB 
> cannot force distributions to schlep Python 2.4 for all eternity and we 
> don't want to add Python 2.4, then deprecate it right away only to add 
> 2.5 and repeat forever more, we need to somehow find a way to "freeze" 
> the behavior via the spec.
> 

Yes, and we've got distributions already shipping 2.5, without 2.4, 
Mandriva specifically.

> Right now the links for the modules point to the 2.5 documentation when 
> they probably should point to the 2.4 documentation. The way I interpret 
> what we are trying to do is as follows:
> 
> Distributions may supply any version of Python (2.4 or later). 
> Applications can depend on the 2.4 interfaces.
> 

I'll adjust the verbage to reflect this.

> This means if in 2.6 one of the interfaces changes, app vendors still 
> can get the 2.4 behavior. Otherwise we just broke the LSB deprecation 
> policy (assuming 2.6 is available less than 6 years after 2.4 was 
> released). Therefore the documented interface behavior should be the 2.4 
> documentation and not the latest (currently 2.5) or we would change the 
> spec via link every time a new version of python is released.
> 
> IMHO we should clearly document this intend and we should also alert 
> users to the fact that the links point to what the LSB wants to include, 
> i.e. documents describing the 2.4 behavior.
> 
> For cPickle for example that would be
> 
> http://www.python.org/doc/2.4/lib/module-cPickle.html
> 
> instead of
> 
>  http://docs.python.org/lib/module-cPickle   (this is the 2.5 version 
> and will be 2.6 in the future).
> 

This is no problem, just a makefile change.  For some reason zipimport is 
a 404, although python doesn't complain when I import it on 2.4.2. Perhaps 
this one needs to drop also or change to zipfile?

> I know we do not want to duplicate the documentation but it might be 
> worth it to just host the Python 2.4 docs as a copy on the LF site to 
> assure that we don't end up with broken links if the Python folks decide 
> to change their site or worse yet end up pointing to the wrong interface 
> documentation.
> 

Makes sense. I think for other reference docs we've somehow procured an 
agreement that the reference would remain static.

-- 
Stew Benedict
The Linux Foundation