On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 10:32:30AM +0200, Ulrich Berning 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. > More and more people tend to say "Runs on Un*x" when they really mean > "Tested on Linux". Un*x is not Linux.
Python development doesn't seem to have any volunteers who use AIX or HP-UX and can fix bugs on these platforms. Searching bugs.python.org, I find about 20 open AIX issues, 4 or 5 HP-UX issues, 6 IRIX bugs, and about 15 Solaris bugs; but I don't know if any of the developers here use these platforms. (There is a Solaris buildbot, at least.) This means that if people didn't use ctypes and wrote C extension modules instead, those extension modules probably wouldn't work on AIX and HP-UX either. I'd rather see a standard library that's as featureful and useful as possible, and not constrain it in order to support platforms that we don't really seem to be supporting anyway. There's a bug report about ctypes on AIX (1637120) and an old one about ctypes on Solaris that looks like it's fixed, but I can't find a report for HP-UX. Part of the problem seems to be that libffi is written for GCC, so using the vendor compiler often causes difficulties. --amk _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
