[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 16:33:08 CET 2006

Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> writes:

On 26-jan-2006, at 13:29, Thomas Heller wrote:

Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net> writes:

On Thu, Jan 26, 2006 at 09:54:51AM +0100, Thomas Heller wrote:

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 It shouldn't be too hard to use Python's main configure script to calculate the information necessary to build libffi. A lot of it is already calculated anyway (sizeof various type, endianness), some can be hardcoded (FFINORAWAPI). In PyObjC I just compile the files I need from my setup.py. But I have an easy task, I just need to support two CPU architectures on one OS.

Thanks for the encouragement - Martin suggested a similar approach.

From my understanding (which goes not very far) the configuration does two things: determine the set of source files that needs to go in depending on the cpu architecture, and to determine some information and make them available in #defines. I have to check if this is possible without patching the libffi sources themselves. I guess I could look into the PyObjC setuop script.

Personally I only have access to machines running windows, linux (x86 and x86_64), and OS X (plus possibly a Mac running ubuntu), so I could only do it for those. Maybe support for other architectures can be added by volunteers?

Besides: James Y Knight seems to be correct that all the scripts needed to build libffi seems to have this special exception from the GPL.

Thomas

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