Suitability of Python for daemon processes

[Ben Boeckel]

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Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 05:08:03PM -0400, Mike McLean wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 12:41 AM, Dennis Gilmore <dennis-
OMEdqnBlyiw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> 
>> The daemon distinction might be wrong thing to fixate on here. There
>> is nothing in that distinction that should exclude python (or most any
>> language). I think the real factors of concern are: size, complexity,
>> speed, system load, robustness, and security.
>> 
> <nod> By and large I agree with you. One thing further to think about is that
> becoming dependent on a tool written in an interpreted language means that
> you need to install that language on your system and may become tied to a
> specific version of that language.  In theory, this shouldn't be worse than
> tying yourself to a specific C library but in practice I've found that
> parallel installing interpreters and their libraries is a lot less supported
> than parallel installing a C lib.
Hopefully we have 2.4 as the minimum version. I'm pretty sure 2.4 is ubiquitous 
even on the enterprise-y distributions, but if we need older, we can try for 
that as well.

> Using python in Fedora Infrastructure probably isn't too big a deal as we
> have abundant python programmers here to port things forward if the main
> developers don't but it is something to consider with other languages or
> in other environments.
We're aiming to get it to work on RHEL/CentOS 4 (base, not + EPEL) and Debian 
stable so that current mirrors running systems that old don't need to upgrade 
the OS to start using our software (I'm pretty sure we have the hardware to run 
test instances of the software with various setups). If the libraries we end up 
using just aren't available, I think RHEL 5 will be a suitable minimum. When 
Python 3 comes looming over any distribution that starts using our software, we 
should be able to help port things over. I'd expect Fedora to be the first for 
this to happen to, but I could see Gentoo having howtos for getting 3.0 as the 
main Python before that (not that servers would be running such a setup 
anyways).

> -Toshio

- --Ben
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