[Python-Dev] 2.5 open issues (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Fri Apr 28 17:41:15 CEST 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

- bdistdeb in distutils package (Owner: ???) http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-February/060926.html Isn't that MvL?

I spoke in favour of including it, but don't recall ever to committing as a "sponsor/second" of including it (and I certainly didn't write it).

I can't find a patch for bdist_deb right now, so if nobody steps forward with actual code to include, this gets probably dropped from 2.5. Notice that the URL quoted actually speaks against a bdist_deb command.

- Support for building "fat" Mac binaries (Intel and PPC) (Owner: Ronald Oussoren) Yes, this would be cool.

This is nearly committed. For some reason, SF apparently dropped my last change request for it, and Ronald's patch responding to this request, so it barely missed 2.5a2. Regardless, I guess Ronald will release his 2.5a2 binaries in the fat form.

For those interested, one surprising (for me) challenge in this is that WORDS_BIGENDIAN can't be a configure-time constant anymore. It doesn't need to be a run-time thing, either, because at run-time, you know the endianness of the (current) processor.

It isn't configure-time constant, because each individual gcc invocations runs two compiler passes (cc1) and two assemblers, which incidentally have different endiannesses.

So WORDS_BIGENDIAN now must be a compile-time constant; fortunately, gcc defines either BIG_ENDIAN or LITTLE_ENDIAN, depending on whether it is the PPC cc1 or the x86 cc1 that runs.

To make this work with autoconf on systems which don't define either of these constants, pyconfig.h.in now has a block that derives WORDS_BIGENDIAN from _(BIG|LITTLE)ENDIAN if they are defined, and makes it configure-time otherwise.

So in short: WORDS_BIGENDIAN will always be right, and will have two different values in a fat binary.

Regards, Martin

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