[Python-Dev] DRAFT: python-dev Summary for 2006-01-01 through 2006-01-15 (original) (raw)

Thomas Heller theller at python.net
Thu Jan 26 09:54:51 CET 2006

Tony Meyer <tony.meyer at gmail.com> writes:

------------------------------------- Adding ctypes to the standard library -------------------------------------

Thomas Heller suggested that ctypes be included in core Python (starting with 2.5). The common response was that while ctypes is a useful, popular, mature module, it does make it very easy to get a core dump, which violates the guideline that if you get a core dump it's a bug in Python or in a third party extension or you're doing something harebrained. On the other hand, it was pointed out that the dl module suffers from the same problem, and is included without any warnings (the documentation was later fixed to include warnings). Martin v. Löwis suggested making ctypes a dynamically loaded module (ctypes.pyd), so administrators could remove it, and I could also make it a separate option in the Windows installer, so administrators could opt out of installing it. Everyone seemed happy with prominent warnings in the documentation, and so this is how it was checked in.

Well, it is not yet checked in. The current state is that ctypes uses GPL'd tools to build libffi, and those can't be committed into Python SVN.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-January/059937.html

Currently I tend to agree with Martin and drop the idea for now, but this probably doesn't belong into your summary ;-).

Thomas

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