[Python-Dev] Pronouncement needed in issue9675 (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Sep 28 18:32:03 CEST 2010

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 8:18 AM, David Malcolm <dmalcolm at redhat.com> wrote: [...]

This breaks quite a few third-party modules, some with segfaults; we (as in Fedora) ran into this building with 2.7 as the standard /usr/bin/python for Fedora 14.

We fixed some of them, but are advising people not to turn on warnings as errors in our release notes [1]

Sure, but do realize that if an extension segfaults when warnings are turned into errors, that is ultimately a bug in the extension, and an indication that the extension is playing loose with error checking. There are likely other places where the module's error checking is also too loose, and this can be a cause of general instability (e.g. segfaulting instead of raising an exception when other rare errors occur, e.g. interrupts or out of memory or even I/O errors).

See this tracker bug for a survey of the gory details: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=620842&hideresolved=0

The list includes SWIG, numpy, and the GTK stack.

TBH, I'm not surprised. Those are very large code bases, and SWIG in particular is by its nature limited in the amount of error checking it can provide (as the error checking sometimes has to be in the C++ code it wraps).

I'd be more than happy to patch Fedora's python builds to remove the deprecation warning, but I don't want to stray too far from python.org's "official" behavior here.

So, I'm +1 on removing this deprecation warning in 2.7, FWIW (though I'm not a committer yet)

FWIW, you don't have to be a committer for your +1 to count. But you do have to provide additional argumentation, which you did. (IOW thank you!)

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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