[ZF] LWN: Fedora7 dropping Zope due to Python 2.5 incompatibility

[Tres Seaver]

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According to this article:

  http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/233347/3bfae735b0e102ff/

Those who've heard me rant before on using '/usr/bin/python' to run Zope
in production will likely expect me not to care about this issue;
however, allowing people to test Zope easily via 'yum install zope'
seems a reasonable goal, and one on which we are about to lose ground.

I've done some brief looking at the issues involved;  most of them look
like BBB fouls to me (things break which did not cause warnings of any
sort under Python 2.4, and without any mention of the change in
NEWS.txt).  In a couple of cases, the workarounds are straightforward:

 - 'DocumentTemplate/ustr.py' has a really weird case trying to deal
   with Unicode passed to Excaption objects;  I could get past the
   startup failure by replacing the 'wrapper_descriptor'-triggering
   code with an 'isinstance' check.

 - 'zope/interface/common/interfaces.py' tries to stamp an interface
   on a no-longer-existing 'OverflowWarning' type;  wrapping a
   'try: except NameError' around it made that go away.

However, the next problem lies in the way 'ExtensionClass.Base' sets up
the type structure;  there is an assert failing in Python's
'Objetcts/typeobject.c:extra_ivars' which looks as though Python has
radically changed something in the way extension types are supposed to
be initialized.  Given that Jim's name is still thanked in the header
files for this stuff, it seems a bit of a gratuitous foul that the
longest-extant out-of-tree extension object abruptly quits working;
again, there is nothing in NEWS.txt which highlights rationale for such
a change to the C API.

I never even got to look at the set of changes I was expecting to think
about (security semantics of the new AST-based compiler stuff).

Anybody else think we need to look into this?


Tres.
- --
===================================================================
Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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