Re: python 2.2 to python 2.3 transition

[Donovan Baarda <abo@minkirri.apana.org.au>]

On Sun, 2003-08-10 at 17:55, Matthias Klose wrote:
> This seems to be a common misunderstanding. Therefore the CC to
> debian-python that I have something as a reference.
[...]
> > As far as I know, it already works with Python 2.3. And 2.2. And 2.1. I
> > like the fact that the same package works fine both on woody and in
> > unstable. :)
> 
> No. The package ships compiled python modules. These are maybe
> compiled with 2.1 or 2.2. If a user other than root uses these
> modules, python2.3 detects them as invalid and compiles them on the
> fly each time the module is used.
> 
> So you have to rebuild the .pyc files with python2.3, either by the
> postinst/prerm scripts (dh_python), or by shipping the .pyc files. The
> former one is the preferred way described in the python policy. See
> /usr/share/doc/python/python-policy.txt.gz

Please don't ship with .pyc's ... it is unnecessary bloat to the
packages IMHO.

There are probably some packages that have "Depends: python" that work
with a whole variety of versions of python. Provided they compile their
modules with "/usr/bin/python" in their postinst, and remove the pyc's
and pyo's in their postrm, they should not need updating.

However, people who have these packages installed before the 2.2 -> 2.3
transition will have pyc's compiled for 2.2 when the default python is
2.3, unless the new python (2.3) package is going to do something about
it to re-compile them all.

Is there any magic planned :-)

Does anyone want me to contibute some code to try and do this? I think
the "python-central" stuff has most of the code to handle this, it just
needs a little bit of tweaking.


-- 
Donovan Baarda <abo@minkirri.apana.org.au>