| msg47739 - (view) |
Author: Stuart D. Gathman (customdesigned) |
Date: 2005-02-09 21:18 |
| Support for AIX 4.1 got lost, or was dropped with python 2.3. The only thing AIX 4.1 needs over generic AIX support is a call to loadbind when loading dynamic modules. This patch also provides stubs for openpty in posixmodule and wgetnstr in cursesmodule. The openpty stub is non-functional. The wgetnstr stub is functional, but uses a fixed size temporary buffer. |
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| msg47740 - (view) |
Author: Martin v. Löwis (loewis) *  |
Date: 2005-02-09 23:46 |
| Logged In: YES user_id=21627 I don't understand the patch. Why do you provide an implementation of openpty that says it creates a pseudo tty master slave pair, and is implementented by setting errno to ENOENT? The changes to remove loadbind were made in dynload_aix.c 2.12, where Guido applied #568629, which in turn was from Oren Tirosh. It was meant to replace the new module, so I presume the change to dynload_aix was unintentional (but then, it is probably no problem, as nobody noticed during the entire life of Python 2.3). Assigning this to gvanrossum for further comments, and also asking orenti to comment. |
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| msg47741 - (view) |
Author: Guido van Rossum (gvanrossum) * |
Date: 2005-02-09 23:55 |
| Logged In: YES user_id=6380 Sorry, I don't have a clue any more. |
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| msg47742 - (view) |
Author: Stuart D. Gathman (customdesigned) |
Date: 2005-02-10 01:26 |
| Logged In: YES user_id=142072 openpty patch: The openpty stub is nonfunctional. I spent a day trying to emulate enough pty stuff on AIX 4.1 to get it to work - but failed. At least with the stub it compiles. Almost everything else works on AIX 4.1 (need to get db4.2 installed for bsddb to work, curses has a few bugs). AIX 4.1 has BSD style ptys (with matching pty and tty pairs), and also sysv style where opening a magic device assigns you an arbitrary minor device number. I'm pretty sure it is possible to make ptys work reasonably with python on aix 4.1, but I haven't had time to get it to work. By returning ENOENT, python code that depends on pty support thinks that none are available - which is effectively the case at present. dynload_aix patch: The change to dynload_aix.c was correct for aix 4.2 and later. It is only aix 4.1 that requires the call to loadbind. That is why the restored code is ifdefed for _AIX41 specifically. I did notice during the lifecycle of python 2.3, in that I never got python2.3 to run on aix4.1 - but I didn't have time to track down the problem. I am just getting around to it now, but thought I'd go for 2.4 instead. |
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| msg47743 - (view) |
Author: Stuart D. Gathman (customdesigned) |
Date: 2005-02-10 03:25 |
| Logged In: YES user_id=142072 As to assigning priority. We have only 2 machines left which still run AIX 4.1. I wouldn't be mad if you simply said "we don't support AIX 4.1 any more" so as not to clutter the code with ifdefs for an older release that not many people are still using. However, those unix servers just keep going and going, and python is a great scripting language. Maybe there should be a separate download page for patches to get python to work with obscure/obsolete systems - just so others don't have to repeat my debugging. |
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| msg47744 - (view) |
Author: Martin v. Löwis (loewis) * |
Date: 2005-02-10 04:40 |
| Logged In: YES user_id=21627 We have PEP 11 (http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0011.html) for such cases. If you don't mind, I can list you as the maintainer of the AIX 4.1 port, and claim that we won't support any AIX versions before that (I long wanted to find out what the oldest AIX version is that we need to support). Then, if you lose interest, or become unresponsive to questions, we would mark AIX 4.1 as unsupported, removal of the code to follow a release later. We are certainly willing to take patches as long as people want to contribute them in a timely manner; we don't want to support Python on systems which don't have any users anymore. |
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| msg47745 - (view) |
Author: Stuart D. Gathman (customdesigned) |
Date: 2005-02-10 05:13 |
| Logged In: YES user_id=142072 I am happy to be the aix-4.1 maintainer as long as we have the systems. You should list aix-4.1.5 as the oldest supported version (since that is what I have.) When the last two 4.1 systems are gone in a few years, the oldest AIX systems we have will be AIX 4.3.x - which is what the majority of AIX4 users will have. AIX rpms are available at http://bmsi.com/aix/ (and a tar.gz of a binary rpm-3.0.6). |
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| msg47746 - (view) |
Author: Martin v. Löwis (loewis) * |
Date: 2005-03-05 13:05 |
| Logged In: YES user_id=21627 I still don't understand why the openpty patch is needed. You said "at least with the stub it compiles". Does this imply that it won't compile without the stub? Why? If HAVE_OPENPTY is not defined (as it apparently isn't), it should compile just fine. |
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| msg47747 - (view) |
Author: Stuart D. Gathman (customdesigned) |
Date: 2005-03-08 04:55 |
| Logged In: YES user_id=142072 It compiles, yes. But the resulting object tries to link to some functions that don't exist on AIX4.1: ld: 0711-317 ERROR: Undefined symbol: .grantpt ld: 0711-317 ERROR: Undefined symbol: .unlockpt ld: 0711-317 ERROR: Undefined symbol: .ptsname posixmodule.c rolls its own declarations for these functions - hence the link rather than compile error. Strangely, AIX4.1 has a man page for these functions - but they simply don't exist in libc.a - or any other IBM supplied library. I have searched exhaustively with find . -name "*.a" | xargs nm |
fgrep ptsname. I also checked IBM PTFs back in Python2.3 days. Since neither pty API supported by python actually exists on AIX4.1, I investigated whether to emulate grantpt/unlockpt/ptsname or openpty. I determined that openpty would actually be easier to emulate - but I haven't gotten around to it (although my Aunt has one in her kitchen drawer. :-) So I put in a stub so it would compile and link - planning to add the actual functionality when I need it. You know - the ol' open source itch scratch. |
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| msg83869 - (view) |
Author: Daniel Diniz (ajaksu2) *  |
Date: 2009-03-20 21:44 |
| Unless someone tells me that providing 'stubs for openpty in posixmodule and wgetnstr in curses module' is still a valid concern, I'll close this. |
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