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Re: when and why did python(-minimal) become essential?



On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 11:36:13PM -0600, Joe Wreschnig wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-01-19 at 12:12 +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > Some reasons:
> > 
> >   * compatability with Ubuntu -- so that packages can be easily ported back
> >     and forth between us and them; I expect most of the work ubuntu might do
> >     on improving boot up will require python-minimal
> 
> This would be nice. Right now it's accomplished through patches Ubuntu
> makes to dh_python and cdbs. They'd probably like to drop those.

As a point of information, Ubuntu doesn't patch dh_python at present,
and I don't see any Python-related changes in cdbs at the moment either.

> > I don't know what's actually in (or more importantly not in)
> > python2.4-minimal though.
> 
> I'm eyeballing right now. Things that jump out at me:
>  * No character encoding, translation, or locale handling.
>  * A little oddly, loss of shutil.
>  * No sockets.

FWIW the relevant design docs from when this was done in Ubuntu are
here:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EssentialPython (requirements)
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PythonInEssential (details)

The rationale for the set of included modules is in the latter, and was
basically done by taking each module in perl-base and mapping it to its
Python equivalent.

> The third seems like something software in base may want to do; I
> mention it specifically because perl-base include socket support.

Socket support does seem to be there:

  $ dpkg -c /mirror/ubuntu/pool/main/p/python2.4/python2.4-minimal_2.4.2-1ubuntu2_i386.deb | grep socket
  -rw-r--r-- root/root     49608 2006-01-17 12:59:02 ./usr/lib/python2.4/lib-dynload/_socket.so
  -rw-r--r-- root/root     12876 2006-01-17 12:58:18 ./usr/lib/python2.4/socket.py

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]



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