Marc-Andre Lemburg wrote:
> Is that binary compatibility scheme documented somewhere ?

Not sure, it's been referred to and adhered to many times in the FreeBSD
community, but I'm not sure where it's documented. I'll ask around on
the FreeBSD mailing lists and post my findings here.

FWIW, the freebsd kernel and package system have options specifically
for compatibility with previous major versions. ie: FreeBSD 8 has
COMPAT_FREEBSD7 and COMPAT_FREEBSD6 kernel options, and has
misc/compat7x and misc/compat6x libraries available for install. But
again, I'll let you know for sure.

>> FWIW, I've had to patch python in a very large set of client 
>> installations. This patch has become a routine in order to unbreak 
>> python wrt to platform dependent packages.
> 
> Since this only affects easy_install/setuptools, it's probably
> easier to just create a patched egg for that and then use it
> with the normal Python installation.

True, I could give that a shot.