[Windmill-dev] Python 2.4.x support

[Mikeal Rogers]

One of the most requested features we've gotten is for Python 2.4  
( even a few requests for 2.3 ) support.

After seeing that some other people actually got it working on 2.4  
without an insane amount of modifications I've decided to take on the  
task of getting this fully supported.

The biggest issues with 2.4 support have been the fact that we're  
using some newer features of urlparse and xmlrpclib than the ones in  
2.4 stdlib. I'm opposed to removing the use of these new features,  
particularly for urlparse since the code that utilizes it is some of  
the most complicated parts of windmill, the proxy failover logic.  
Instead, I'd like to just add some dependency requirements for 2.4 to  
setup.py.

This means that windmill will continue to REQUIRE setuptools.  
setuptools isn't just how we build and distribute windmill, it's going  
to become an even more ingrained part of the product. With setuptools  
if we require a newer dependency version than the one installed in  
stdlib then setuptools will install it and the _newer_ dependency will  
become the default module overriding the one in standard lib. This  
should allow us to get windmill working on 2.4 with minimal changes to  
windmill.

Here is the catch. I'm not going to advertise this support until we  
have some buildbot slaves up and running. I'll be working on 2.4  
support over the next week or so, but it's not going to be officially  
supported until we have some automated infrastructure to find 2.4  
breakage. It's too large of a burden on developers to ask they run  
tests on all support Python versions, and it's not fair to our users  
to say we support something that none of us ever test.

If anyone has a few boxes laying around with GUI's on them, we'd love  
if you could offer some cycles to a buildbot slave. I'll work on  
getting the master up and running and getting some docs together on  
how to add a slave.

I'll also be adding some new directories to the windmill trunk that  
will contain some buildbot info, and some other general cleanup in the  
source tree.

-Mikeal