[Python-Dev] Detecting 64bit Windows (was RE: Reminder: last alphas next Wednesday 07-May-2008) (original) (raw)

Mark Hammond mhammond at skippinet.com.au
Fri May 2 10:46:27 CEST 2008

-On [20080502 07:57], Mark Hammond (mhammond at skippinet.com.au) wrote: >The best way I can find for the win32 API to tell you this is a combination >of the above and the IsWow64Process() (which returns True if you are a >32bit process on a 64bit platform)

Support for IsWow64Process() is quite interesting in itself, so if you can add support for that, cool. :)

OK - I'll make a patch for this tomorrow (unless someone pipes up suggesting it's not a great idea, or that ctypes should be used, etc)

>I'd be interested to know why you care though - ie, how will the behavior >of your programs depend on that?

For Genshi I was mucking around with setuptools to create Windows eggs. My machine at home is an AMD64 box. I have Python 2.5 installed, which is 64 bits on Windows x64. On a normal Unix box an egg for a 32 bits system will result in something like Genshi-0.5devr847-py2.5-linux-i686.egg. On an 64-bits system we get Genshi-0.5devr847-py2.5-linux-x8664.egg. This distinction is important since Genshi includes a speedups.so which is compiled to either 32 or 64-bits.

Yeah - see recent changes to support cross-compilation in distutils - particularly http://bugs.python.org/issue2513, and a grep for 'plat_name' in Distutils/command might also help.

So from what I gather we have no unique way to refer to 32-bits or 64- bits Python aside from the semi-adequate platform.architecture()[0].

From the above, it's not clear what problem you have other than arranging for setuptools to select the correct binaries and generate an egg with a distinction in the filename. Ie, why isn't platform.architecture() (or possibly distutils.util.getplatform) adequate to have setuptools "do the right thing" in your examples? Unfortunately though, I don't know enough about setuptools to suggest how this might happen. If you go this route, please followup on the distutils list (I must have missed your message there while I was on vacation)

Cheers,

Mark

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