On Jun 11, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Vincent Bernat wrote: >It would help some of us (at least me) if someone could explain what the >story behind python-support and dh-python2 is. It seems that everything >was dealed in private. From my point of view, dh-python2 is here only >because python-central could not be deprecated by its author in favor of >python-support for political reasons. That does not help to adopt it.
The main reason why we're favoring dh_python2 is because, to the extent possible with Python 2[*], everything is in the package. Because pyc files cannot be shared across Python versions, and yet in almost every case the source code can, the Python 2 helpers create symlinks for the py files from a shared directory into a version-specific directory, because Python will put the pyc files next to the py files. Unlike the other helpers, dh_python2 includes the symlinks in the package, so in most cases, packages which use dh_python2 will come with everything they need instead of being created at installation time, which is fragile. (py files are still and always byte-compiled upon installation, but that's fine). With Python 3, the symlinks are no longer necessary because pyc and .so files from different Python versions (well, >= 3.2) can coexist. Cheers, -Barry [*] The only exception is namespace package __init__.py files, which unfortunately still need to be created at package installation time, and which dh_python2 does properly by reference counting them. Hopefully PEP 382 will land in Python 3.2 and be back-portable, which would eliminate the need to create even these files at installation time.
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