[Python-Dev] Reworking the GIL (original) (raw)
Andrew MacIntyre andymac at bullseye.apana.org.au
Mon Oct 26 13:37:14 CET 2009
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Brett Cannon wrote:
It's up to Andrew to get the support in. While I have faith he will, this is why we have been scaling back the support for alternative OSs for a while and will continue to do so. I suspect the day Andrew stops keeping up will be the day we push to have OS/2 be externally maintained.
Notwithstanding my desire to keep OS/2 supported in the Python tree, keeping up has been more difficult of late:
- OS/2 is unquestionably a "legacy" environment, with system APIs different in flavour and semantics from the current mainstream (though surprisingly capable in many ways despite its age).
- The EMX runtime my OS/2 port currently relies on to abstract the system API to a Posix-ish API is itself a legacy package, essentially unmaintained for some years :-( This has been a source of increasing pain as Python has moved with the mainstream... with regard to Unicode support and threads in conjunction with multi-processing, in particular.
Real Life hasn't been favourably disposed either...
I have refrained from applying the extensive patches required to make the port feature complete for 2.6 and later while I investigate an alternate Posix emulating runtime (derived from FreeBSD's C library, and which is used by Mozilla on OS/2), which would allow me to dispense with most of these patches. But it has an issue or two of its own...
The cost in effort has been compounded by effectively having to try and maintain two ports - 2.x and 3.x. And the 3.x port has suffered more as its demands are higher.
So while I asked to keep the OS/2 thread support alive, if a decision were to be taken to remove OS/2 support from the Python 3.x sources I could live with that. A completed migration to Mercurial might well make future port maintenance easier for me.
Regards, Andrew.
--
Andrew I MacIntyre "These thoughts are mine alone..." E-mail: andymac at bullseye.apana.org.au (pref) | Snail: PO Box 370 andymac at pcug.org.au (alt) | Belconnen ACT 2616 Web: http://www.andymac.org/ | Australia
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