How to gracefully deal with failed future feature (future) imports due to old interpreter version?

Question

“I’d like to inform the user that they need to rerun the program with Python >= 2.6 and maybe provide some instructions on how to do so.”

Isn’t that what a README file is for?

Here’s your alternative. A “wrapper”: a little blob of Python that checks the environment before running your target aop.

File: appwrapper.py

import sys
major, minor, micro, releaselevel, serial = sys.version_info
if (major,minor) <= (2,5):
    # provide advice on getting version 2.6 or higher.
    sys.exit(2)
import app
app.main()

What “direct import” means. You can examine the contents of __future__. You’re still bound by the fact the a from __future__ import print_function is information to the compiler, but you can poke around before importing the module that does the real work.

import __future__, sys
if hasattr(__future__, 'print_function'): 
    # Could also check sys.version_info >= __future__. print_function.optional
    import app
    app.main()
else:
    print "instructions for upgrading"

Leave a Comment Cancel reply