[Twisted-Python] Python 2.2 Support

[Phil Mayers]

Mary Gardiner wrote:
> So, the previous version of this thread came up with:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2005, Jonathan Lange wrote:
> 
>>Should we drop Python 2.2 support in Subversion head for Twisted 2.2?
>>
>>- Debian stable now comes with Python 2.3
>>- Twisted 2.1 has been released with Python 2.2 support
> 
>   - the most commonly used version of Red Hat Enterprise still has
>     Python 2.3
> 
> Therefore:
> 
> 
>>Some bad consequences:
>>- People wanting to run Twisted 2.2 (or svn) on ancient versions of
>>Python won't be able to.
> 
>   - in particular, people wanting to run Twisted 2.2 on RHE will need
>     to upgrade to the very latest, less widely used, version
> 

FWIW we use an enormous quantity of (Twisted- and not-)Python code here, 
of which I'm the prime maintainer. As a matter of course, I build a 
local copy of Python on RHEL3 boxes, because the extensive use of Python 
in Fedora/Redhat sysadmin tools makes me somewhat nervous about tooling 
around with the system copy.

What I'm saying is that it's not a huge barrier to entry needing to 
build Python2.3/4/5 from source (in fact the big pain is getting various 
extension modules, pyOpenSSL in particular - and an egg-ified Python and 
Twisted would help that immensely). Though having fast server machines 
makes it less painful (which is solveable using a /usr/local-ified RPM).

My suggestion would be to aim for the following - an egged Twisted, 
deprecate Python2.2, then a user installing Twisted has to do three things:

wget Python2.3.tgz; tar xzf Python2.3.tgz; cd Python2.3
./configure && make && make install

...then

wget easyinstall.tgz; tar xzf easyinstall.tgz; cd easyinstall
/usr/local/bin/python2.3 setup.py install

...then

easy_install Twisted

...which ideally would pull down all the various modules and associated 
crap required to actually include the batteries in Python ;o)