[Python-Dev] Snake farm (original) (raw)

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
11 Nov 2002 13:24:25 +0100

Marc Recht <marc@informatik.uni-bremen.de> writes:

Although I'm quite sure the FreeBSD community doesn't like it I'll make a patch against sys/defs.h to put a define BSDSOURCE at the top of the chain which sets the default environment and post it to the freebsd-current discussion list.

Could you please call it EXTENSIONS? Many of the functions that fall under it are not BSD specific, and _BSD_SOURCE selects the favour-bsd API on other systems.

_BSD_SOURCE would be fine for things that are traditionally in BSD, but have been superceded by competing POSIX API. In that case, Python would want to use the POSIX API. So would would not want to define _BSD_SOURCE (just as we don't want to define _OSF_SOURCE and _GNU_SOURCE, but cannot avoid doing so).

I'm quite sure it's an object to be extended.. There are some strange systems out there which all need special treatment..

... or just cannot be supported. Please see PEP 11, we'll be phasing out support for a number of such systems. It's just not worth the pain. Python works on Posix systems, and uses extensions where available. It does not work on strange systems; tough luck for users of such systems (we have yet to hear from a DYNIX user who wants to run Python 2.2).

> Only if all other options have been exhausted. What problems occur if > XOPENSOURCE is defined? XOPENSOURCE sets POSIXCSOURCE.

And why is that a problem?

Regards, Martin