[Xapian-devel] [Xapian-commits] 10367: trunk/xapian-bindings/ trunk/xapian-bindings/python/

[Richard Boulton]

James Aylett wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 04:13:22AM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:
> 
>>> python/doxy2swig.py.in: Fix build with --enable-maintainer-mode
>>> and python 2.2, by providing fallback for the "textwrap" module,
>>> which isn't present by default in 2.2.
>> It doesn't seem great that the files we ship should vary so greatly
>> depending what Python version is installed.  Perhaps it would be better
>> just to say that --enable-maintainer-mode requires Python >= 2.3?
> 
> +1

Fair point.  I should have thought this though a bit more.

>> Or we could just drop 2.2 support in 1.1.0 - perhaps a slightly extreme
>> reaction, but it's close to 5 years since the last Python 2.2 release,
>> and I can't see people conservative enough to still use such an old
>> Python version wanting to install a ".0" release of Xapian anyway, so
>> it's worth considering.
> 
> I'd rather deprecate 2.2 support at 1.1.0 and drop at 1.2.0, if we
> can. (We don't really have a policy for this, but it's in line with
> feature deprecation.) Not sure how we communicate it; python has some
> sort of deprecation warning system, I think, or we could just print a
> big banner on configuring xapian-bindings in some way?

I'm for dropping it now, actually.  It currently works (with just the 
fix that I added above), but is showing signs of starting to become a 
maintainance problem.  In particular, over the next year (ie, the likely 
1.1.x timescale) we'll be trying to support python 3.0 as well as 2.x, 
which will be headache enough with 2.4 and 2.5, without having to worry 
about 2.2.  So, we'd probably end up dropping it midway though a release 
cycle.  Better to do it now, (and put it back if people actually want it).

I'll revert the change I made, for now.

-- 
Richard