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

[Andreas Jung]

--On 10. Mai 2007 01:50:55 -0400 Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:

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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.

Fedora again *sigh* - we had the very same discussion when Zope 2 only 
blessed for Python 2.3 and Fedora shipped with Python 2.4. Unfortunately 
the Zope maintainer was not open for arguments why we would not support 
Python 2.4 at that time.

>
> 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).
>

I think the AST changes (required for RestrictedPython) are the hardest 
part.

Anyway...personally I don't care about what FC is doing or not. The official
Python versions are documented. If Zope 3 decides to go with Python 2.5 for
the 3.5 release then Zope 2 must move also. Perhaps time enough to fix
the outstanding issues. Until then let the Fedora trolls do whatever they 
want. On our side we could document the Python dependencies a bit more 
clear on a dedicated page - although the release notes are clear on the 
Python versions.

Andreas

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