[Python-Dev] Providing support files to assist 3.x extension authors (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sun Dec 20 09:49:13 CET 2009

Several questions come to mind:

1) Is it reasonable to provide backward compatibility files (either as .h or .c) to provide support to new API calls to extension authors?

I'm skeptical. In my experience, each extension has different needs, and will also use different strategies to provide compatibility. So publishing one way as the "official" approach might be difficult. In one case, the proposed approach for compatibility actually led to incorrect code (by ignoring exceptions when extracting a long), so we would need to be fairly careful what compatibility layers we can bless as official.

2) If yes, should they be included with the Python source or distributed as a separate entity? (2to3 and/or 3to2 projects, a Wiki page)

In the way you propose it (i.e. as forward compatibility files) I fail to see the point of including them with Python 2.7. Extension authors likely want to support versions of Python before that, which now cannot be changed. So those authors would still have to include the file on their own.

So a file distributed in Include of 2.7 actually hurts, as it would conflict with the copy included in packages.

3) If not, and extension authors can create their own compatibility files, are there any specific attribution or copyright messages that must be included?

If you write a compatibility file from scratch, without copying existing code, you don't need to worry at all. If you do copy parts of Python, you must follow the license, in particular clause 2.

Regards, Martin

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