[csw-maintainers] Python 2.7

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

Peter Felecan contacted me some time ago about building Python 2.7 and
possibly transitioning from 2.6 to 2.7.

Here's r21514 which has been recently applied to the 2.7 build branch:
http://lists.opencsw.org/pipermail/devel/2013-July/026807.html

It takes the set of patches from 2.6 and applies them to 2.7.

Many of the patches applied to the 2.6 are one of the following:
- they're trying to fix a problem which is already fixed 2.7 upstream
- they're trying to fix a problem that never was a problem
- they're trying to fix a problem that does not affect Solaris 10
- they're actively breaking Python, such as the infamous "site" patch[1]

The "site.diff" patch is horrible, should have never been allowed, and
should never ever happen again. Out Python is currently broken[2] and
it's very difficult for us to fix it because of the number of modules
built into the unversioned directory.

I propose that r21514 is rolled back.

When that's done, let's discuss what do we want to do about Python
2.7. Peter's concern is that if we keep the versioned directory, it
will be hard to transition to 2.7. Peter's objective is to package
calibre, which needs Python 2.7 and a number of modules. I suggest
that we build Python 2.7 as it was before r21514, in a versioned
directory, and we build the necessary modules as CSWpy27-foo.

Maybe we could patch Python 2.7 to look into the unversioned directory
for modules – as a backup solution. But we would need to see if this
would break anything or not.

Thoughts?

Maciej

[1] http://lists.opencsw.org/pipermail/devel/2009-May/009173.html
[2] http://lists.opencsw.org/pipermail/users/2012-October/009338.html