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

[Ivan Krstic]

Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> still finding bugs against the current python, let alone a new and
> relatively untested code base.

It's neither new nor untested; it's a relatively conservative
incremental improvement from 2.4, and has gone through three betas to
chase down potential problems. As I mentioned earlier, there have only
been three point releases of 2.4, which is a reassuring track record.

> The memory management patch sounds nice [...]
> Especially since we don't even know that we have a problem today.

We certainly do have a problem; we will have a persistent Python server
process running the entire time the laptop is powered on. In 2.4, this
process won't release memory back to the kernel. Ever. On a 128MB
system, this upgrades the importance of Evan's patch from 'nice' to
'critical'.

Details at http://evanjones.ca/python-memory.html.

> And if you want to spend you
> time on that, I guess that's fine.

I don't want to spend my time on distro work. However, I don't see
having 2.5 as an option but as a necessity, which means I'll spend time
on it if I can't convince you to. The alternative is to backport Evan's
patch to 2.4, which again means maintaining our own Python.

-- 
Ivan Krstic <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D