[AG-TECH] Critical Python Bug Affecting AGTk 2.2

[Ivan R. Judson]

We've discovered a problem with Python 2.2.2 that has a critical effect on
the operation of AGTk 2.2. This unfortunately has a serious side effect for
the platforms we can support. 

The effect of this bug is that the VenueServer .cfg and .dat files are
incorrectly loaded, which causes the venueserver to subsequently checkpoint
them incorrectly. This causes them to get corrupted and no longer work. The
fix many people have done is to copy fresh versions of those files into
place at a restart.

We have a test, which can verify if the bug is present on your machine.
Please contact us for details.
 
We have two challenges we are dealing with right now:

1) Getting our servers on platforms that have more the more recent python
available.

We are building machines with our internal build tools, which is moving us
to Gentoo. Gentoo support for the AGTk is not official, but you can expect
it will become official in a very short time.

2) Deciding on how to deal with platform support.

RedHat 7.3 does not have python 2.2.3+ available, RedHat 9.0 is already
abandoned. Therefore, we'll be working with external folks (Doug you know
who you are :-) to begin nearly immediate support for Fedora Project
distributions. We're accelerating this, and expect to try and make packages
for 2.2 available as soon as we can.

This serves as official notice that we will not be supporting RedHat 7.3 or
9.0, effective as soon as we have a working Fedora Project distribution
available.

We're sorry for the short notice on the platform shift, we'll try to make
this as quick and painless as possible.

--Ivan