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Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

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Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#121

Post by zokier »

jacquesm wrote: post #65
gaius wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the ancient days, stuff the OS relied on was in /usr/sbin and stuff that was "yours" was in /usr/local/bin (or /opt) and stuff that no-one was quite sure whose it was was in /usr/bin. And lo, peace and harmony did reign upon the face of Unix. And the sysadmin did lie down with the developer, and it was good. Who even knows how it works these days?

If there is one thing that ticks me off about modern unix it is that to install I end up having to install / upgrade half the rest of the system because of all the interdependencies between packages.

I thought that was one problem Gentoo tried to solve by allowing users to select which libraries/features to use with the packages they installed

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#122

Post by barfoomoo »

wwortiz wrote: post #117
barfoomoo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am complete newbie when it comes to running a server but have a bit of experience using Ubuntu in my local box. Is ubuntu a good choice? Since most use a flavor of Red Hat like CentOS I am a bit hesitant to use Ubuntu in production.

It depends on what you are using the server for and who is using the server. Ubuntu and debian are used by plenty of people in production and are probably the better choice for learning how to set up a server if you already use ubuntu. Apt is also a great package manager.

Will be using it host a small e-commerce web site that I am building on the side.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#123

Post by dschobel »

ubernostrum wrote: post #107
dschobel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard the distro argument used by any of the python maintainers and I would be surprised if they had. The solution to distros which are bundling three year old software is not to halt your progress for three years, that should be obvious.

The solution to distros which are bundling three year old software is not to halt your progress for three years, that should be obvious. Speaking as Django's release manager: Red Hat's continued use and support of ancient 2.x Python versions has been a factor in the schedule we're developing for migration to Python 3.x. We can't simply pull the rug out from under anyone who's using Django on RHEL.

Seeing RHEL/CentOS keep coming up led me to some googling and the first result for "RHEL python" is http://www.python.org/download/linux/ (about as official as it gets) which says

The IUS Community Project maintains recent versions of Python for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS. Installations are parallel installed next to stock versions of python therefore don't disrupt the functionality of critical python utilities on the system.

Doesn't that solve the issue and keep you from being hamstrung by those distros?

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#124

Post by avar »

jedbrown wrote: post #93
avar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that the difference between Perl-5.6 and Perl-5.12 is much less than between these versions of Python and recent releases. Your impression is correct. Perl is a more mature platform than Python, and backwards compatibility is taken more seriously. The latest Perl 5.12 release can still run most of the test suite for Perl 1 released back in 1987. That and its wide availability and portability make it…

There's a lot of equivalent old warts in Perl that haven't been fixed This is the crux of the issue. Serious language users (especially the ones writing the new libraries that add significant value to your platform) want the warts fixed to make the environment pleasant to work in. Meanwhile, most casual users are desperate for backward compatibility because it makes distribution easier. I actually prefer Python's cho…

I should have said: They haven't been fixed by default.

Perl is also moving forward, it's just doing so differently than Python. Python has major releases like 2.6 and 3.0 where they explicitly break old code in the default installation.

Perl however doesn't break any of the old warts by default, but developers can easily do so by importing modules like Moose and perl5i in their own code. See http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Moose and http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?perl5i

Perl's model means that you can usually upgrade any code base from say 5.6 to 5.12 without major headaches. But if you try to do the equivalent with Python 1.6 to 3.0 you'll run into trouble.

There are advantages to both models, but with Perl's you rarely see users with big legacy code bases staying behind on some legacy 10 year old release of Perl that may have bugs and security issues. Users usually just upgrade along with their OS without any major pains.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#125

Post by acqq »

ubernostrum wrote: post #106
jedbrown wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Django is in a very different situation because Python is central to all of its users, therefore it is reasonable to expect that they maintain a somewhat modern (released in the last 3 or 5 years, say) environment. When Python merely performs a subsidiary role, and your users may never use it themselves, it is far more important to support old versions.

I mentioned Django as a counterexample; the conversation seemed to be heading toward using the single specific example of Mongrel to demonstrate that there either is not a problem here or that it's not particularly serious. Meanwhile, anyone who depends on Python for much more than a config-file parser knows what a genuine and large issue this is, and that "just write to the lowest common denominator" is not really a…

However your replies started with your response "That's simply unacceptable" to my "I'd very much like to know why it wasn't easier for him to simply write in Python 2.4" You mentioned (in this context actually OT) Django much later.

And I still don't know if he tried adjusting his already existing Python code to simply be backwards compatible -- he never mentions that, neither why that would be a problem in his particular case.

Regarding Django, see the other replies here about side-by-side installations, it's more than reasonable if you have something big which always runs, but not reasonable for a small config script used once.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#126

Post by alexgartrell »

mahmud wrote: post #76

Instead of inventing your own syntax, why didn't you use a portable syntax like XML, JSON, YAML, or better yet, libconfig[1]? Please compare the libconfig test file to the mongrel configuration file: http://www.hyperrealm.com/libconfig/test.cfg.txt http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-190003.... The mongrel conf is a subset of libconfig; it doesn't use the more advanced features. Plus libconfig has bi…

The mongrel2 configuration architecture makes it pretty easy to write a libconfig configuration shell. All it would need to do is translate the libconfig stuff to sqlite.

If using libconfig is a good idea, it'll win.

P.s. imho, this is the cool thing about the Mongrel2 stuff. The good ideas can always win, because there really just isn't a whole lot to Mongrel2-core, and everything else is decoupled.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#127

Post by zokier »

Doesn't every non-stale language suffer from the same thing? So either your choices are a) using language that hasn't evolved or b) using an old version of language which has evolved. I'm not sure that alternative b is that much worse than a.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#128

Post by gaius »

joshfinnie wrote: post #119
jnoller wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except no one installs ActiveState. For most, most of the market, the RedHat supplied version of python is python.

Does RedHat still have that much of a market share in linux to demand such? I guess I am out of the loop, but I hear way more about ubuntu these days than RedHat...

If you want to target "Linux" generically then stock Red Hat is your safest bet. I don't know anyone with 10,000 Ubuntu boxes in a datacentre.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#130

Post by bcl »

ubernostrum wrote: post #105
bcl wrote: post #94

FYI - Fedora 13 shipped with Python 2.6, Fedora 14 is going to ship with Python 2.7 and 3.1 in parallel. Not every distribution ships ancient versions. I also recommend using virtualenv and pip, these tools make it much easier to create an easily reproducable Python environment.

Not every distribution ships ancient versions. RHEL, meanwhile, does not ship 3.1, 2.7 or 2.6. And to be perfectly honest, if you're seriously distributing Python software you have to take RHEL into account -- "Fedora ships something newer" doesn't help.

The EPEL5 repository has Python 2.6 available - http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/SRPMS/repoview/...
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