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Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

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Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#151
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd very much like to know why it wasn't easier for him to simply write a Python code that doesn't use anything not existing in 2.4. Just because he downloaded to his computer whatever later version he likes he can't expect from all distros and all users to have exactly the same version across of all the currently running computers, it's more than unrealistic, it's simply impossible and always will be.

I'd very much like to know why it wasn't easier for him to simply write a Python code that doesn't use anything not existing in 2.4. This isn't an "oh, a brand-new version just now came out and it's not in the distros yet" problem. Python 2.4 is six years out of date at this point. Python 2.3, which Red Hat will support until 2012, is even older (and for the longest time Red Hat didn't even use a 2.x Python at all --…

So after complaining that he could not use new language features that appeared six years ago, he went back and rewrote the whole thing using a different language whose syntax is much much more than six years ago.

I guess he must have found these must-have Python 2.5 language features that are so important and desirable in C.

And by the way, don't use new GCC features, because some ancient GCC versions will be supported by Red Hat until 2020.

For God's sake, support != enforce

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#152

Zed Should have used Lua(the entire lua source distro weighs couple of hundred kilo bytes). Lua is superb embedded language and even better configuration language. No one needs to know it is Lua, (which also happens to be a marketing problem for Lua, heh). His decision not to use Lua the second time around is perplexing because he is not averse to reusing third-party libraries and he is already using the code from Lu…

Josh Simmons, one of the main Mongrel2 hackers other than Zed, is already working on that.

The idea behind Mongrel2 is that you can write your own configuration system in any language you want, as long as the final result is an SQLite3 database. The one in C that ships with Mongrel2 is "just" a default - if you don't like it, it's not hard to roll your own.

Here's an early peek Josh's Lua config tool, and a sample config file: http://gist.github.com/578726

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#153
Narcissism and self-promotion as usual.

People who have any trouble with a system perl or python or java are shipping their own versions within the package.

Sap Bussiness Object, for example, comes with its own perl 5.004 and Sun JDK 1.4.

It is also possible to provide an up-to-date package for most used OSes. You cannot replace system's default python interpreter, because to much things in distros are depended on it, put it could be /opt/python

btw, it is only Debian-based systems and RHEL who are lagging behind. Fedora is always up to date.

I'm considering this post as just a flame-generator. There is no problem at all.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#154
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Gentoo's package manager, Portage, is written in Python, so Python presents a special challenge, when upgrading or using a different version that the default.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the question is "Do a significant number of users run into problems with a piece of software," then the consensus is absolutely relevant.

The question isn't whether there is a problem but whether there is a solution. The virtualenv/pip people seem to think so.

Yes, pip/virtualenv works for installing things like Django.

It totally fails for something like m2sh which has to live in the system PATH so that you can run it from wherever you have your configs.

But you know, I wonder if the various distros could sort of invert this and they start using pip/virtualenv instead of everyone else working around them?

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#156
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tell me about it! I just wanted to install folding-mode for Emacs the other day, dselect wanted to install a new sodding IM client as well! (Something in emacs-goodies-el depended on it). About 50M it came to! So I just did it by hand, more like 50k...

That's an even more extreme example than the one that I just ran in to. Wow.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#157
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…

I thought about something like that, but wanted to duplicate the existing config file format so that people's configs would keep working (mostly). It actually had some cool advantages, like a nice psuedo variable system letting you setup variables for reuse in different parts of the config file.

I haven't really seen that in other config formats, and it is damn handy.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#159
post #7

I understand what Zed's saying here - particularly as I came to programming from a sys admin background. Just like Perl before it, Python (and to some extent, Ruby if you use Puppet) are part of the OS (Linux OS or OS X that is). Shit can and will break if you mess with your OS. You never got this with PHP because people didn't use it in their OSs. But there's a simple solution: not only does the Ministry of Packagin…

pip and virtualenv don't work for a program like m2sh that has to be in the PATH all the time so you can run it from anywhere.

Another thing is that non-python programmers wouldn't even bother to use virtualenv. Really only Python programmers would.

Re: Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python"

#160
I have found that the one system that doesn't give me any trouble running Python is Ubuntu. I'm using Ubuntu Server 10.4, specifically, which is the latest LTS (Long Term Support) version.

Ubuntu 10.4 has Python 2.6 but I wanted Python 2.7 (which is the LAST 2.x version). So here's what I did: I installed all common dependencies (such as OpenSSL with "apt-get build-dep python2.6", since they're all the same for Python 2.7. Then I installed Python 2.7 with "make altinstall" without disrupting the system's base 2.6 install. Then, I got pip and virtualenv installed.

I've never been happier doing Python development. pip never failed to install a single package I needed, and Python 2.7 is fast and gives me a safe path of migration towards Python 3, whenever the whole byte/str issue in the network libraries (or at least WSGI) is 'resolved'.

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