prefer Python for new scripts?

[Greg Hudson]

I like Python.

I may set up Buildbot at some point to replace the ad hoc nightly test
framework Ken set up.  Time permitting, I may also work on Python
support for system tests (similar to what we have in tcl--the ability to
easily set up and tear down Kerberos environments to run test cases in).
I don't think there's a Python equivalent of "expect", so in a few cases
we might need to beef up programs to accept passwords from sources other
than the controlling terminal, if we don't have support for that
already.

I am not too worried about the 3.0 transition.  I suspect Python 2 will
be with us for a number of years.  However, I would suggest we avoid
runing Python scripts during the build unless we can be very minimal
about the version requirements.  For developer scripts (run during
distro-prep, or the test suite, or by hand) I'm tentatively okay with
using Python 2.5 as a minimum, although I'd like to know if we have any
developers who regularly use an OS which ships Python 2.4.  Some of the
Python 2.5 features look fairly nice (like conditional expressions) but
none of them look like must-haves.