[gopher] Re: pygopherd on Debian stable

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2004 at 09:53:03AM +0200, Alessandro Selli wrote:

>       I'm considering installing pygopherd to replace UMN gopherd on a
>       Debian stable server running on a SPARCStation5.  However, this
>       distribution comes with python version 2.1.3, while pygopherd
>       needs version 2.3.  In order to have pygopherd running I'd need
>       to upgrade the server to the testing python package, plus a
>       small number of other dependencies.  I wished I didn't need to

You have several different options.  You can probably get a usable
Python for woody from www.backports.org or www.apt-get.org.

However, I have an even easier solution -- you can just install Python
from source.  Python is easy to build and install from source and you'll
have no problem doing this on your woody box.  Just download Python 2.3
and configure it to go to somewhere other than the system's default
location -- /opt/python2.3, for instance.  This location should also
*NOT* be on your PATH.  PyGopherd uses few C extensions to Python, so
you don't have to worry about the Tk, GDBM, etc. stuff that the Debian
maintainers do.  Essentially, all that happens when you build Python
from source like this is that it builds the interpreter and installs the
Python sources and C modules for the standard library.

Now, install PyGopherd from source.  All you should have to do is run
"/opt/python2.3/bin/python setup.py install" in the PyGopherd directory
and you should be set.

>       have mixed stable/unstable packages on the "frontline" server,
>       so before I give up on the server's "purity" and upgrade python
>       with the testing package I wanted to ask this: when pygopherd
>       was developped, was python 2.3 used because some of it's
>       features where needed in order to have a fully functional
>       gopherd server, or was it just because that was the python
>       version available on the developer's computer and maybe
>       pygopherd can work on python2.1?  Any idea?  Should I just try
>       that?

There was nothing about 2.1 that would make it impossible to use for
PyGopherd.  In fact, PyGopherd may well still work fine with Python 2.2,
though I'm not certain.

Newer versions of Python do provide features that make the job of
implementing the server *easier*.  I do not nkow exactly how prevalent
the use of post-2.1 features is; I believe that I wrote PyGopherd
against Python 2.2 originally.

I did think about compatibility, but what it comes down to is that I
decided that restricting myself to only features that worked on older
Python versions was not a desirable goal, and since I didn't use those
older versions, could also not be readily tested.  And given that Python
2.3 is trivial to install on just about any system that supports at
least Python 1.5, I figured it would not be a major problem.

-- John