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Mon May 19 21:36:25 CEST 2008 · https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-May/079579.html

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 2:03 AM, Ulrich Berning
<ulrich.berning at denviso.de> wrote:
> Gregory P. Smith wrote:
>
>> On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 1:32 AM, Ulrich Berning
>> <ulrich.berning at denviso.de> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> As long as the ctypes extension doesn't build on major Un*x platforms
>>> (AIX,
>>> HP-UX), I don't like to see ctypes dependend modules included into the
>>> stdlib. Please keep the stdlib as portable as possible.
>>>
>>
>> Nice in theory but ctypes already works on at least the top 3 popular
>> platforms.  Lets not hold Python's stdlib back because nobody who uses
>> IBM and HP proprietary stuff has contributed the necessary support.
>> Making nice libraries available for other platforms is a good way to
>> encourage people to either pitch in and add support or consider their
>> platform choices in the future.
>>
>> -gps
>>
>>
>
> It's not my platform choice, it's the choice of our customers. I'm not using
> these platforms just for fun (in fact it isn't fun compared to Linux or
> Windows).
>
> If porting libffi to AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris... (especially using vendor
> compilers) would be an easy job, I'm sure it would have been done already.

Well, ctypes isn't simple. =)

> If more and more essential packages depend on ctypes, we should make a clear
> statement, that Python isn't supported any longer on platform/compiler
> combinations where libffi/ctypes doesn't build. This would give me arguments
> to drop support of our software on those platforms.

You are mixing the stdlib in with the language in terms of what is
required for Python to work, which I think is unfair. Just because
some part of the stdlib isn't portable to some OS does not mean Python
is not supported on that platform. If you can run a pure Python module
that does not depend on any C extension, then that platform has the
support needed to run Python. Everything else is extra (which is why
we have modules in the stdlib only available on specific platforms).

-Brett

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[Python-Dev] Addition of "pyprocessing" module to standard lib.