Friedel en ander frappanthede

In all of our products in the Translate project, we try to keep track of our dependencies well, and work hard on ensuring backwards compatibility in so far as we feel we reasonably can. Since we want to install easily on many platforms (especially in the case of Virtaal), it is sometimes a bit hard to do all the research about dependencies.

Answering a simple question such as "Which version of Python is installed in the recently released versions of RHEL?" is harder than it should be in my opinion. Of course, then we need to answer the same thing for each of our dependencies. But it gets a bit harder when dealing with optional features of packages.

For example, we work on most versions of SQLite, but run much better with certain optional features compiled in. How can I find out which distros have it compiled in and which don't? When did they start shipping packages with feature X enabled? These are important questions for us, since we want to use good features in our dependencies, without requiring the latest and greatest of everything that many users might not have on their system yet. Of course people could compile everything themselves, but that is not an activity that as strongly associated with our target audience.

To answer my question about RHEL, I ended up finding my answers by visiting the Wikipedia page on Centos to find the release dates of RHEL versions, and on the Centos website there is a nice page with links to the SRPMs for RHEL.

The final conclusion: Python 2.4 is still alive and kicking, but it took way to long to answer such a simple question. I started a page to make some notes for developers in our project to note the best sources of information on our dependencies. Hopefully it grows into something useful. Please add in the comments or to the page if you have further advice.