Re: [Gnu-arch-users] The future of GNU Arch users

[Aaron Bentley]

James Blackwell wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 12:14:25PM +0100, Toby White wrote:
> 
>>And bzr is not an option - I don't mind it being written in Python; I
>>can usually find a version of Python on most hosts, but its requiring 
>>minimum 2.4 makes it useless to me.
> 
> 
> 2.4 is admittedly a high target. However, by December (the target release
> date for bzr) 2.4 will be the common version out there. 

Ironically, one of the reasons we started requiring 2.4 (we previously
required 2.3) was that 2.4 has the subprocess module, which makes
crossplatform compatibility a lot better.  (2.3 and earlier had various
gotcha's and differences between the way child processes worked on
Windows vs POSIX.)

Of course, generator expressions and decorators are also nice to have.

One of the ways I compare whether software is widely available is "is it
in Debian stable?"  Python 2.4 now meets that requirement.

> Anybody that considers continuing the tla and/or baz code base should bear
> in mind that the two teams that were working on the codebases decided to
> go for full rewrites.

('the two teams' being Tom Lord et al, and Canonical et al)

> My sincere advice is to stick with tla for as long as it continues to meet
> your needs and then migrate to bzr when you are ready (such as when python
> 2.4 is on many of your machines). As long as youre internally focused you
> should be able to continue on with tla for awhile.

Hear, hear!  We're using tla at work still.  Let's not try to force a
square peg into a round hole.  Given a bit of time, I think the hole
will get squarer and the peg will get rounder, but that's just my gut
feeling.

Aaron

-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
Panometrics, Inc.