Hello everybody,
there has (again) been some grumblings about the python transition (hi
Thomas!). The python Bof at the debconf has been successfull at deciding a
new python policy. However this policy is not implemented yet. That's what
causing this delay...
The new policy is more or less the following (people may correct me if I'm
wrong):
The major changes are for packages providing public modules:
* they should support all current python versions (the set of supported
python versions is defined by the python-all and python-all-dev packages)
* the same packages should indicate via an XC-Python-Version field in the
debian/control file (source paragraph) the python versions that they
support. This field can be either a list of supported versions ("2.3,
2.4") or an interval (">= 2.4" or ">=2.1, <<2.4") or "all" (if no
restrictions are known).
* the dependencies (hopefully created automatically by dh_python) will
indicate the right interval automatically:
right now for example it would be "python (>=2.3), python (<< 2.5)"
for a package saying "XC-Python-Version: all"
* the packages should provide all "python2.X-foo"
that they really provide (i.e. it must of course correspond to the
content of the package, which in turn should correspond to what
XC-Python-Version says). This Provides field can also be generated
by dh_python. (This is particularly relevant for binary modules of
course but it can make sense for non-binary modules as well, for example
if they don't support an old version anymore, stopping to provide
python2.3-foo would for example forbid upgrading a /usr/bin/python2.3
application relying on it)
For applications:
* if they use /usr/bin/python, they should simply depend on python-foo
modules that they use.
* if they use /usr/bin/python2.X, they should depend on python2.X-foo
modules that they use.
For private modules (not sure here):
* no change except that they can also use XC-Python-Version to get
a good python dependency automatically
As you can see, the bulk of the work is:
- modifying the rules file to build all versions for binary modules
- implementing the dh_python changes
Note: The policy doesn't require pycentral or python-support. But both of
these tools help to achieve the multiple-version support with a single
copy of the .py files.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Premier livre français sur Debian GNU/Linux :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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