[petsc-dev] windows fixes.

[Satish Balay]

On Fri, 28 Jun 2013, Barry Smith wrote:

> 
> On Jun 28, 2013, at 2:36 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> 
> > Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
> > 
> >>    I was just kidding; I do think decorators are a better design. But
> >>    I don't want --download-python just so they can be used in a
> >>    couple of random places :-)
> > 
> > I agree that one thing is not worth it, but if we added
> > --download-python up to python-2.6, we could clean up BuildSystem using
> > 'with' statements and could make it also work with python-3, which has
> > been the default Python on Arch Linux for almost two years now and will
> > be default on Ubuntu and other systems next year (with python2 not
> > installed by default).  At some point, we will either be asking users to
> > install an old Python to use PETSc or we'll have to limit our
> > backward-compatibility, asking users of antique operating systems to
> > either upgrade their Python or use --download-python.

I expect all these distros to have python2 available aswell. [and most
will be installed - due to other depencencies]

And we might have to change '#!/usr/bin/env python' to '#!/usr/bin/env python2'
in our scripts.

>    One day we will switch from python 2* to python 3*, just not yet.

I was hoping to use RHEL as a baseline for our minimum python version

RHEL5 with python2.4 has EOL date March 2017

RHEL6 has python-2.7 [EOL November 2020]

Presumably we can have code that works with both python3 & python2.7 when rhel5 is dead?

Satish