[Python-Dev] Segmentaion fault with wrongly set PYTHONPATH on Windows (original) (raw)

anatoly techtonik techtonik at gmail.com
Mon Oct 22 21:28:26 CEST 2012

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 7:37 PM, Christian Heimes <christian at python.org> wrote:

Am 22.10.2012 18:26, schrieb anatoly techtonik:

I don't know what is abort() on Linux, but I believe coredumps is not something you want to get while setting some environment variable. On Windows it outputs a standard crash dialog box, which immediately raises questions about Python stability and potential exploitability in this direction. abort() is a C stdlib function that kills the current process with SGIABRT or similar. It's designed to draw attention to a fatal error. Are you proposing that Python should rather use exit() than abort() here? Both forcedly shut down the process immediately.

I am not a C coder and don't have any core Unix programming background. If Python is unable to start because it can not find its libraries, I prefer an explanative error message with standard system error code. Even if it is Fatal Python error - this case is still in user land and should be fixed normally. The error message could be improved though. Right now I get:

E:>python Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: unable to load the file system codec ImportError: No module named 'encodings'

This could be improved to:

Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: unable to find module named 'encodings' in 'C:'

-- anatoly t.

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