Re: Python extension commands in git - request for policy change
- From
- Krzysztof Mazur <krzysiek@podlesie.net>
- Date
- Nov 25, 2012, 21:41 UTC
- Message-ID
- <20121125214139.GA29465@shrek.podlesie.net>
- In-Reply-To
- <20121125024451.1ADD14065F@snark.thyrsus.com>
On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 09:44:51PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
Show 13 quoted lines
> > We're behind the best-practices curve here. The major Linux > distributions, which have to deal with almost the same set of > tradeoffs we do, went to Python for pretty much all glue and > administration scripts outside /etc a decade ago, and the decision has > served them well. > > That, among other things, means up-to-date versions of Python are > ubiquitous unless we're looking at Windows - in which case Perl and > shell actually become much bigger portability problems. Mac OS X > has kept up to date, too; Lion shipped 2.7.1 and that was a major > release back at this point. >
What about embedded systems? git is also useful there. C and shell is everywhere, python is not. Adding additional dependency if it's not really needed it's not a good idea.
Also not everyone uses up-to-date systems and sometimes you just care about some critical parts and do not touch everything else and there is probably quote large number of systems with python < 2.6. And even when you keep your system up-to-date, there are some GNU/Linux distros that are still supported, but does not provide recent python - for instance PLD Ac, which I still use on some systems and will use until the hardware dies, provides only python 2.4.6 (by the way, important packages like git are of course quite recent there - 1.7.11.1).
Krzysiek