[Python-Dev] issue 9807 - a glitch in coexisting builds of different types (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Mon Oct 4 22:01:17 CEST 2010

On Oct 04, 2010, at 09:10 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

On Mon, 4 Oct 2010 14:41:11 -0400 Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

For a distro, all those Python binaries have to go in /usr/bin. We already symlink /usr/bin/python to pythonX.Y so I don't see the harm in a few extra symlinks. Why would a distro want to provide all combinations of Python builds?

Maybe not all, but definitely several. At least a normal build and a debug build, but a wide unicode build possibly also.

One important issue for me is guessability. While "d" is reasonably guessable (and "dbg" or "debug" would be even better), "u" and "m" are not. (actually, "u" could lead to misunderstandings such as "is this a unicode-enabled version of Python?"; as for "m", I don't know what it's for)

I think symlinks will make this discoverable. I like that the binary name's suffix flags matches the flags used in PEP 3149, which also makes it easy to document. I could imagine python3-dbg would be symlinked to python3.2d (or whatever).

As for the SOABI, you could use a different mangling which would preserve the ".so" suffix -- e.g. "-debug.so" instead of ".so.d". At least then well-known conventions would be preserved.

We already have libpython3.2.so.1.0 which also doesn't end in .so. I suppose we could put the build flags before the .so. part, but I think Matthias had a problem with that (I don't remember the details).

-Barry -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20101004/c7beb0d9/attachment.pgp>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list