[Zope-dev] Zope and Python compatibility

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Tue, 14 Jan 2003 09:25:24 -0500


> On Monday 13 January 2003 7:46 pm, Casey Duncan wrote:
> 
> > I personally feel like Zope should run on 2.2.x whether required or not.
> > Requiring 2.2.x does have the advantage of limiting the possible blessed
> > configurations on which Zope will run, thereby making development, support
> > and bug fixing that much easier.

[Toby]
> Im not sure thats true. Having less strict version requirements
> means that there will be *more* *people* doing the development,
> support, and bug fixing.

Hm.  My experience with Zope 3 is that if developers can choose
different Python versions, it's quite easy for version-dependent bugs
to creep in, and it can take a while to track these down.  For
example, Zope 3 currently has some unit test suite failures that only
occur on Python 2.3, and the only developer who knows the broken code
well enough to fix them has no time to maintain both the 2.2.2 and the
2.3 code.

So I'm (now) convinced that we should pick one Python version and
stick with it, and not worry (too much) about failures with later
Python versions.  But it's Brian's call, and unless he agrees to
switch back to 2.1.3, this is moot.  In the mean time I ask not to use
Python 2.2 features like bool gratuitously.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)