I know that if I really need generators, then I really need to install something newer than the 2.4 that comes with RHEL/CentOS 4.

Generators is 2.6+, right?

BTW, an ugly approach I used (more or less as a joke) was to check for generator availability and, in case I can't use them, use a list comprehension instead. There is a performance/memory hit but, depending on what you are doing, it's a usable alternative. And a nice place to hang humorous comments.

But I agree that, if your users don't want to install an alien (from the package manager POV) Python in order to run Mongrel, getting rid of python code is the right thing to do.

It's like having a weird dependency, kind of requiring a Fortran 77 compiler in order to run Perl...

Um...generators are Python 2.2+ (introduction of the yield statement):

http://docs.python.org/release/2.2/ref/yield.html

Generator expressions are 2.4+:

http://docs.python.org/release/2.4/ref/genexpr.html

That said, I don't disagree with removing the Python dependency from the "core" of Mongrel2. As was noted in an earlier comment, people can always write a config file management tool in any language they want (or Mongrel2 bindings in general, for that matter).

> Generator expressions are 2.4+:

So, what is the big deal? I can swear the oldest Python I had to deal with for the last couple years was 2.4.