[LLVMdev] Minimum Python Version

[Gregory Szorc]

On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at google.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Dimitry Andric <dimitry at andric.com> wrote:
> > On 2012-12-01 21:57, Gregory Szorc wrote:
> >>
> >> I'd like to continue the discussion about minimum Python versions from
> the
> >> "Use multiprocessing instead of threading" thread in its own thread
> because
> >> I feel it warrants additional discussion.
> >
> > ...
> >
> >> For these reasons, I urge LLVM to drop support for Python older than
> 2.6.
> >> I would encourage requiring 2.7 (preferably the latest available
> release -
> >> 2.7.3 at this time) at the earliest convenience, but I'm not explicitly
> >> asking for it. While continued support for older Pythons is a noble
> goal and
> >> may continue to support people clinging to ancient Python releases, this
> >> will only make the path forward more difficult, as it puts an additional
> >> burden on those maintaining Python in the tree.
> >
> >
> > That is all well and good, but please be reminded there are zillions of
> Red
> > Hat (or CentOS) users out there, stuck with either Python 2.5 or 2.6, who
> > cannot easily upgrade without busting their whole system...
> > ___________________
>
> To install a new Python version one doesn't have to "upgrade" and
> surely not "bust" their whole system! You can install a newer version
> of Python alongside older ones, and if everything else fails you can
> just install it locally and use *that* to run the Python scripts LLVM
> requires. It's quite easy to set up


I'd like to echo how simple this is. Compiling Python from source is
literally configure + make. There are also tools like buildout [1] that
make it extremely easy to install multiple Python versions side-by-side.
And, since Python is prolific, you can bet that there exists an apt, yum,
etc package somewhere. I think simple instructions pointing to these would
be sufficient to not upset users of machines "stuck" on Python 2.5 and
below.

[1] https://github.com/collective/buildout.python
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