On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 04:14:43PM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote: > On the whole, C has fewer versioning problems than the popular scripting > languages (Python, Perl, Tcl). I don't know Perl and Tcl, but as far as > Python is concerned, to the best of my knowledge the major reason we > have several Python release versions in a Debian release is that > extensions to the Python interpreter (e.g., bindings to various C > libraries such as GTK+) need to be compiled for each release series > (2.1, 2.2, 2.3) separately. $ du -sh /usr/lib/perl/5.8.2/ 11M /usr/lib/perl/5.8.2 $ du -sh /usr/lib/perl5/ 2.7M /usr/lib/perl5 $ Same deal with perl -- perl transitions just happen to be managed better in Debian than python transitions, which stands to reason since we have more practice at perl transitions (and it causes more problems when things go wrong). Probably the python licensing snafu of a couple years back also contributed to the mindset of trying to support multiple binary-incompatible python versions concurrently, whether or not the language itself justified such parallelism. Regardless of the reasons, it would definitely be nice to see python transitions handled more smoothly in the future. This probably requires amending the Debian python policy. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
Attachment:
pgpU1Q4Z1HcpH.pgp
Description: PGP signature