Issue 28156: [Patch] posixmodule: Make the presence of os.getpid() optional (original) (raw)

CloudABI (https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-July/145708.html) does not provide getpid(). Though this may sound quite silly at first, there is quite a good reason for this. One of the things that CloudABI wants to achieve is making large scale (cluster/cloud) computing easier. In such an environment there is rarely a need for having machine-local unique process identifiers. They have to be globally unique and preferably not recycled.

POSIX requires that pid_t is a signed integer that must have a positive value. Most C compilers only provide full support for integers up to 64 bits in size. This means that CloudABI could only provide 63-bit process identifiers, which is far smaller than, say, a UUID. For this reason we've decided to omit getpid() altogether.

Attached is a patch that makes use of the already existing HAVE_GETPID definition in pyconfig.h to disable the os.getpid() function that is part of the posixmodule.