[OLPC-devel] Re: [sugar] Pygtk and garbage collecting

[Christopher Blizzard]

Ivan Krstic wrote:
> Christopher Blizzard wrote:
>> I don't think we're going to move to python 2.5 on the laptop.
> 
> For reasons explained on IRC -- an important memory management patch in
> 2.5, and the fact that 2.5 will have been the stable version for about
> half a year by the time we ship -- I don't see shipping 2.4 as an
> option. That's not even mentioning the actual bunch of very useful new
> features in 2.5.

It might be 6 months from the time that we ship, but it's hasn't been 6 
months today and it hasn't been integrated into Fedora.  And there's no 
way that 6 months is enough time to let this stuff stabilize.  We're 
still finding bugs against the current python, let alone a new and 
relatively untested code base.

The memory management patch sounds nice, but I don't think we've done 
enough testing to know if the pain of upgrading and maintaining our own 
python code base (releases, bugfixing and security fixes) is worth the 
reported benefit of a patch.  Especially since we don't even know that 
we have a problem today.

> 
> Given that Python is our main development platform on the machine, we
> just can't afford to be lazy about it. I care little about the versions
> of the rest of the stack, but I don't want to compromise on Python; if
> you don't want to do the 2.5 migration, please let me know now so I can
> schedule time to do it myself. Having to deal with that would be
> unfortunate, though, as there are far more pressing things for me to
> work on.
> 

I _certainly_ don't think that we're being lazy.  But I do think we're 
picking the battles that we want to fight.  And if you want to spend you 
time on that, I guess that's fine.  But I would rather you were spending 
your time on higher impact things, like making the wiki stuff work.

--Chris