[Python-Dev] Binary CPython distribution for Linux (original) (raw)

Joseph Martinot-Lagarde joseph.martinot-lagarde at m4x.org
Thu Jun 26 21:23:10 CEST 2014

Le 26/06/2014 20:34, Gregory Szorc a écrit :

I'm an advocate of getting users and projects to move to modern Python versions. I believe dropping support for end-of-lifed Python versions is important for the health of the Python community. If you've done any amount of Python 3 porting work, you know things get much harder the more 2.x legacy versions you need to support.

I led the successful charge to drop support for Python 2.6 and below from Firefox's build system. I failed to win the argument that Mercurial should drop 2.4 and 2.5 [1]. A few years ago, I started a similar conversation with the LLVM project [2]. I wrote a blog post on the subject [3] that even got Slashdotted [4] (although I don't think that's the honor it was a decade ago). While much of the opposition to dropping Python <2.7 stems from the RHEL community (they still have 2.4 in extended support and 2.7 wasn't in a release until a few weeks ago), a common objection from the users is "I can't install a different Python" or "it's too difficult to install a different Python." The former is a legit complaint - if you are on shared hosting and don't have root, as easy as it is to add an alternate package repository that provides 2.7 (or newer), you don't have the permissions so you can't do it. This leaves users with attempting a userland install of Python. Personally, I think installing Python in userland is relatively simple. Tools like pyenv make this turnkey. Worst case you fall back to configure + make. But I'm an experienced developer and have a compiler toolchain and library dependencies on my machine. What about less experienced users or people that don't have the necessary build dependencies? And, even if they do manage to find or build a Python distribution, we all know that there's enough finicky behavior with things like site-packages default paths to cause many headaches, even for experienced Python hackers. I'd like to propose a solution to this problem: a pre-built distribution of CPython for Linux available via www.python.org in the list of downloads for a particular release [5]. This distribution could be downloaded and unarchived into the user's home directory and users could start running it immediately by setting an environment variable or two, creating a symlink, or even running a basic installer script. This would hopefully remove the hurdles of obtaining a (sane) Python distribution on Linux. This would allow projects to more easily drop end-of-life Python versions and would speed adoption of modern Python, including Python 3 (because porting is much easier if you only have to target 2.7). I understand there may be technical challenges with doing this for some distributions and with producing a universal binary distribution. I would settle for a binary distribution that was targeted towards RHEL users and variant distros, as that is the user population that I perceive to be the most conservative and responsible for holding modern Python adoption back. [1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.devel/68902 [2] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2012-December/056545.html [3] http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2014/01/08/why-do-projects-support-old-python-releases/ [4] http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/01/09/1940232/why-do-projects-continue-to-support-old-python-releases [5] https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7.7/

Just today I installed Anaconda (https://store.continuum.io/cshop/anaconda/) on Linux servers running CentOS 6.4. It installs in a directory anywhere in the filesystem (no need to be root), and using it globally is just a matter of prepending a folder to the PATH and it was done.

Of course Anaconda is oriented towards scientific applications but it is a proof that a pre-build binary installer works and can be simple to use.

If someone wants to try it without all scientific libraries they provide Miniconda (http://conda.pydata.org/miniconda.html) which contains only python and the python package manager conda.

Joseph

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