On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 23:34, Toby Dickenson wrote:
> > 2. run: emerge -u portage python
> 
> note that -u will update alot of things with ~x86 that you might not want. 
> 

True, although in theory, it works also if you mark them as stable. I've
been running python-2.3 on a stable box without any problems. YMMV.

> > UCS4 uses significantly more memory than UCS2. 
> 
> I have compared ucs2 (with the ebuild in portage) and ucs4 (with hacking that 
> ebuild to include the --enable-unicode=ucs4 configure switch). I compared:
> 1. The sizes of a newly started interpreter using the RES column on 'top'
> 2. The size of a "btdownloadheadless" process seeding a knoppix cd image
> 3. The size of the .tbz2 binary package.
> 
> The empty interpreters are of identical size. The bittorrent process is 
> considerably *smaller* with ucs4, and the tbz2 files are largely unchanged in 
> size. Numbers below. IMHO thats a clear but suprising win for ucs4. Lets use 
> it always.

That is rather suprising. I could only explain that by predicting that
btdownloadheadless doesn't use any unicode objects at all. As I said
before, I think the real test case would be XML parsing.

But hopefully this weekend I could formulate some tests to run to get
something more "scientific". But it might be that my initial
observations were off.

> 
> > Plan for Python's Future
> > ========================
> 
> Portage has a number of packages that still need 2.2 but reference 
> #!/usr/bin/python. For example, rdiff-backup. The distutil eclass has support 
> for forcing /usr/bin/python2.1 (thanks to zope), but I cant see any way to 
> force 2.2. am I overlooking something?

Zope is a special case because it is not supported if you run it on
anything about 2.1. I'm not too familiar with Zope, so maybe some others
can chime in. As for packages that don't work with 2.3, that needs to be
fixed. There is a bug open now that people can report apps that don't
work with 2.3 either because 2.2 is hardcoded or they just need to be
patched.

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33372

Cheers,
-- 
Alastair 'liquidx' Tse
 >> Gentoo Developer
 >> http://www.liquidx.net/ | http://dev.gentoo.org/~liquidx/