[Zope] Re: ANNOUNCE: Zope 2.6.3 Release and Security Update

[Tres Seaver]

Kirk Lowery wrote:
> Tres Seaver wrote:
> 
>> RH9 has been rock solid for us, given two choices we made:
>>
>>   - *Never*, *ever* run Zope in production with the OS's version
>>     of Python:  it *won't* be built optimized for Zope,
> 
> 
> Can you point us to an article or other doc source that talks about how 
> to optimize python for Zope?

Since Python 2.2 (I think), a "stock" Python build is fine, at least on 
modern Linuces:  threads and large file support are configured in by 
default (I think FreeBSD still needs a patch to bump stack size).  Red 
Hat's packaged version of Python, however, does several odd things:

   - It is configured with '--enable-unicode=ucs4', which is OK for
     scripting, but suboptimal for long-running processes (unless the
     dominant charset for your site maps better onto 4 bytes).

   - It splits out critical include files, headers, and tools into
     separate -devel and -tools pacakges, which aren't installed by
     default.  Building extensions is therefore harder, because you have
     to get 'python-devel' installed first, and pydoc is missing (good
     luck figuring out where it should be, if you don't already know to
     look in python-tools!)

   - They are typically "behind" the versions which contain fixes for
     bugs which are particularly noxious for a long-running process
     like Zope.

Tres.
-- 
===============================================================
Tres Seaver                                tseaver at zope.com
Zope Corporation      "Zope Dealers"       http://www.zope.com