>> I see why a guarantee would help, but I don't think it's necessary. >> Just provide UCS-4 binaries only on Linux, and when somebody complains, >> tell them to recompile Python, or to recompile your software themselves. > > Won't recompiling Python break every other Python program on their system, > though? (e.g. anything that itself uses a C Python library)
It depends. If they use their own Python installation, just tell them to use the vendor-supplied one instead - it likely is UCS-4. If the vendor-supplied one is UCS-2, talk to the vendor. For the user, tell them to make a separate installation (e.g. in /usr/local/bin). This won't interfere with the existing installation. > Also, anything involving recompiling isn't exactly user friendly... we > might give Linux a bad name! Hmm. Some think that Linux has becoming worse when people stopped compiling the kernel themselves. >> The defaults in 2.5.x cannot be changed anymore. The defaults could >> be changed for Linux in 2.6, but then the question is: why just for >> Linux? > > Are there different Windows python binaries around with different UCS-2/4 > settings? No. The definition of Py_UNICODE on Windows is mandated by the operating system, which has Unicode APIs that are two-bytes, and Python wants to use them. > BTW, none of this is urgent. We experimented with Python/C hybrids in the > past. It didn't work, so we carried on using pure C programs for anything > that needed any part in C. So it's not causing actual problems for users > right now. It would just be nice to have it sorted out one day, so we > could use Python more in the future. I can understand the concern, but I believe it is fairly theoretical. Most distributions do use UCS-4 these days, so the problem went away by de-facto standardization, not by de-jure standardization. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
