[Python-Dev] In-Python virtualisation and packaging (original) (raw)

Vinay Sajip vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk
Mon Jun 13 18:00:30 CEST 2011

Barry Warsaw <barry python.org> writes:

Question: how hard would it be to backport the work you've done to Python 3.2? Obviously I'm not saying it should be ported to the official 3.2 branch, but if someone were interested in doing so, would it be possible? Sounds like you can almost get there with stdlib changes, but would require a few C changes too (I haven't looked at the diff yet). I'm just wondering if the same API could be made available to Python 3.2 as a third party module. It sounds like "almost, but not quite".

I think it's feasible - as far as I know, there's nothing 3.3 specific about the changes that were made, other than just happening to be against the default branch. AFAIK the getpath.c/getpathp.c changes will also work on 3.2, as all they do is look for a config file in a specific place and read a path from it if it's there. If it's not there, no biggie. If it's there, it sets up the sys.prefix/sys.exec_prefix values from that path.

Possibly Carl's original Python changes would be easier to work from, since the sysconfig stuff has now changed quite a bit because of packaging coming in to cpython. For one thing, the _INSTALL_SCHEMES dict is replaced by reading that data from a config file.

Is the Debian packaging branch available too? I'd be happy to throw that in my PPA for Ubuntu users to play with.

My Debian-packaging-fu is not that good, I'm afraid, so there's no branch for the .deb, as such. I made the package by running make and then

sudo checkinstall -D --fstrans=no

which takes forever (God knows why - it's many many minutes at 100% CPU) but eventually comes up with the .deb.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip

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