Issue 1079 in lilypond: upgrade python in GUB

[lilypond]

Status: Accepted
Owner: ----
Labels: Type-Build Priority-Low

New issue 1079 by percival.music.ca: upgrade python in GUB
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1079

Comment #12 from issue 963:
This may not be the most appropriate place to discuss that, but do we still
want to ship Python 2.4 with the mingw LilyPond build?
(I personally don't care what version we do ship, but when I see the size
of the Windows Lily installer I often wish we could strip the bundled
Python from all unnecessary binaries/translations/etc. in order to make it
lighter.)

Me:
Yes, that was definitely the wrong place to discuss python.

In the right place, there's two issues:
1) upgrading python to at least 2.5 if not 2.6 would let us write nicer
scripts.  However, that requires modifying GUB's python spec file, probably
changing the patches we apply to python, debugging anything that the bumped
python version breaks in other files, etc.  ETA: 10 hours for somebody who
already knows GUB; 40 hours otherwise.

2) can we make the size of the downloaded binaries smaller by omitting
python, or parts of python?  I'm not quite certain what Valentin is talking
about; we definitely need to include python in the binaries, since we're
not going to ask users to install python themselves.  That said, I'm quite
willing to believe that we accidentally included python twice, or that
we're distributing modules we don't need to distribute, or we could compile
python with a --binary-distrib-only option or use py2exe or something.
ETA: no clue.  First step is to figure out what we might be able to do.