gh-76568: Remove ability to import non-version-tagged C extensions by pitrou · Pull Request #4943 · python/cpython (original) (raw)

I don't see why we'd ever want to get rid of it. Certainly we need a longer-than-usual deprecation cycle to change the Windows side (there's currently no supported ABI suffix there for abi3, so extensions using the limited API just use .pyd) as we need to let all the external build tools catch up with whatever change we make. Besides, Windows will already reject incompatible modules on load, so the main motivation from the original email thread doesn't apply.

But honestly, I can't see why this is a big enough issue to need changing anywhere else either. At most, wherever it's documented (is it even documented?) we could warn "hey, here's how this may bite you, and here's the recommended approach". Unless there's a spate of people being caught by this mildly rough edge that I haven't heard about, I'd just drop the whole idea.