[oi-dev] [OpenIndiana-discuss] Calibre doc converter to ebooks formats for OpenIndiana??

[Francois Dion]

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Milan Jurik <milan.jurik at xylab.cz> wrote:
> On 09.08.2012 14:33, Francois Dion wrote:
>> Calibre is written in python, not just the build script. The list of
>> requirements is (the minimum versions):
>>
>> python  2.7.1 not 3.x
> Sooner or later Python 3.2 will be provided in OI SFE but I am not sure how
> much it can coexists with 2.6

As Jan points out in his post 2.x and 3.x can coexist fine. By design,
since python 3 is so different from python 2.4-2.7 it is supposed to
be invoked as python3. Per the release "Python 3.0, also known as
“Python 3000” or “Py3K”, is the first ever intentionally backwards
incompatible Python release".

This duality is normal, and so you have a 2.x and a 3.x series interpreter.

As far as handling multiple python from a 2.x series, that is also
possible. For example, Solaris 10 is stuck at 2.4, so /usr/bin/python
is python 2.4. I installed 2.6 and If you put python2.6 in your #!
statement, then it will call that. You can also install setuptools to
that 2.6 and if you call the easy_install from the python 2.6, all the
eggs are fetched and installed correctly in the 2.6, even though 2.4
is the main version.

Going back to calibre, 3.x wouldn't help. It is written using syntax
that is unique to 2.x, and is close 2.6, except the heavy use of
dictionary features that are only in 2.7, such as dictionary
comprehension. I think this is the first 2.x based project I've
encountered to use that (calibre is also not your typical python
project in that it has quite a dependency on binary libs).

In other words, it needs python 2.7. We probably need it anyway if we
are to grow our python community.



Francois