Re: plpython improvements

Sven Suursoho wrote:
> Fri, 05 May 2006 19:20:55 +0300, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com>:
>
> >> I think that a less confusing way of saying it would be :
> >> "Generators crash if python version used is 2.4.x and it is compiled
> >> with asserts. Currently only known linux distributions to distibute
> >> such python.so
> >> files are Fedora and possibly other RedHat distributions, while
> >> Gentoo, Ubuntu and Suse are OK.
> >
> > Ubuntu ships 2.4 I don't know about SuSE. 2.4 has been out for sometime
> > and it would be a mistake to assume that we won't run into this.
>
> Sure, but it is known problem and there is patch for this bug. In the
> documentation we can clearly state that python2.4 with asserts enabled
> causes problem and describe how it can be tested and fixed (regardless of
> distribution used).
>
> As an example of absurdity of this problem: let's assume there is known
> distribution with buggy gethostbyname(). Fact, that we know about this,
> shouldn't stop us developing TCP/IP applications. Especially, if there is
> also patch for this bug :)
>
> It would be real shame to prevent using generator for SETOF functions
> because it is most natural match for plpgsql's "return next"

For buggy distributions of gethostbyname(), we supply our own version.
We don't just barrel ahead and tell them to fix it, if we can avoid it.
I don't see us bundling a fixed python, however. I realize it is only
Red Hat, but that is a large userbase.

I still do not know why we can't do some kind of runtime test in python
and disable this feature for 2.4 builds that have debugging enabled.
Can we do a dynamic function load test from plpython? There must be
some function that is only visible in debug builds.

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