[Xapian-devel] GSOC - 2012

Olly Betts olly at survex.com
Tue Mar 27 00:13:49 BST 2012


On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 08:22:39AM -0700, Dan Colish wrote:
> On 3/26/12 6:08 AM, Olly Betts wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 08:51:22PM +0800, sabrina wrote:
> >> Python 3 has several release, such as  Python 3.0, 3.1, 3.2. Does SWIG
> >> support all these versions well? When supporting Python 3, which version we
> >> should use?
>
> > I believe SWIG supports all of them - if not, addressing that should
> > really be part of the project.
> >
> > 3.1 and 3.2 are certainly both active release series for Python, so
> > supporting both is desirable I think.  3.0 probably less so.

> SWIG claims to support Python 2.0 and up. I gather its probably not as
> well maintained for versions that old since no one is using them.

Indeed - I've pushed to make SWIG's claims of supported versions more
realistic, but not with much success.

> It certainly has good support for 2.6 and up. If we are targeting
> specific versions, we should support 2.6 and higher.

I assumed the question was specifically about Python 3 versions.
There are still Python 3.1 and 3.2 releases being made, but Python 3.0
only went to 3.0.1 which was released over 3 years ago.  The popular
Linux distros all seem to have 3.1 or 3.2.  I suspect 3.0 was mostly
used by early adopters, who will have moved on long ago.  So I think 3.0
support isn't all that important.

We certainly need to support Python 2 still.  Currently Xapian 1.2
claims to support >= 2.3, and Xapian 1.3 >= 2.4.  The latter was the
result of a discussion a while ago, but I'm certainly happy to review
that.

> The real issue in supporting
> all these versions is testing them. We'll need to run tests on all the
> specific versions we claim to support.

Releases which go in the PPA get tested with Python 2.5.2 as that's the
default Python in Ubuntu hardy.  The latest 2.5 release was less than a
year ago, while the latest 2.4 was over 3 years ago, so 2.5 seems a
plausible place to draw the line at the moment.

Cheers,
    Olly



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