It has been sometime since I made the compat-python-2.4 package for Fedora, with the primary aim of making it possible to provide Zope as a package in the official repositories. There has not been any progress on that front yet. At least the progress is invisible to me.

I had informed the Zope package maintainer (Jonathan Steffan or daMaestro) about the packages and he said he would poke around at Red Hat summit regarding this.

During the course of the conversation at https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-May/msg00226.html I was told to shut the fuck up and put up with it as long as I am not doing anything to support Zope in Fedora 7. Since this is basically a packaging issue and I had never made a package before in my life, I was banking on someone more knowledgeable and experienced to do the job. After all a Python 2.4 compatibility package is not the best choice for your first attempt.

Now that I have made it and expressed my interest in maintaining them if the need be (https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-May/msg00647.html), I am really curious to know why there has been no further progress on this issue.

Something at the back of mind keeps on telling me that it was never a question of 'walking the talk', but of 'passing the buck'.

I badly hope I am proved wrong...

An improved version of the PYTHONSTARTUP file I posted in the previous 'Python hacks' article. As usual it needs the Readline module to work.

New features include saving of the previous session history (in ~/.python_history), and using Esc to do the tab-completion so that the Tab key can still be used for indentation.

try:
import readline
except ImportError:
print "Module readline not available."

else:
import atexit
import os
import rlcompleter

historyPath = os.path.expanduser("~/.python_history")

def save_history(historyPath=historyPath):
import readline
readline.write_history_file(historyPath)

if os.path.exists(historyPath):
readline.read_history_file(historyPath)

atexit.register(save_history)
del os, atexit, readline, rlcompleter, save_history, historyPath

NB: Much of the above material was taken from the Python Tutorial written by Guido van Rossum (http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html).

To turn on tab-completion in Python, one needs to put the following in the PYTHONSTARTUP file. The Readline module needs to be installed for this feature to work.

try:
import readline
except ImportError:
print "Module readline not available."
else:
import rlcompleter
readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")