[Python-Dev] Support for marking limited API elements in C API docs (original) (raw)

Georg Brandl g.brandl at gmx.net
Sat Oct 12 22:04:57 CEST 2013

Am 12.10.2013 21:56, schrieb Antoine Pitrou:

On Sat, 12 Oct 2013 21:19:16 +0200 Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:

Am 12.10.2013 20:20, schrieb Serhiy Storchaka: > 12.10.13 21:04, Georg Brandl написав(ла): >> in light of the recent thread about PEPs not forming part of the docs, >> I've just pushed a change that allows to document C API elements >> not part of the limited API as such. It is done like this: >> >> ... c:function:: int PyTupleResize(PyObject **p, Pyssizet newsize) >> :notlimited: >> >> I have not yet begun adding these to the documents; if someone wants to >> help with this I am glad for volunteers. > > Why this is needed? The limited API is unstable and only developers of > CPython can use it (but they can look in headers).

Well, I may be reading PEP 384 wrongly, but the point is exactly to have a stable API for non-core developers to rely upon, so that they can build extensions that don't need to be recompiled for every version of Python. This is true. However, I find the proposed markup not very enlightening :-) I would prefer if "limited" APIs where marked with a :stableabi: tag.

The way I did it was based on the expected number of changes, which would be lower with the "not-limited" elements being labeled. But changing it around is trivial.

("limited API" is really a bad synonym for "stable ABI" IMO)

It's not a synonym: to get a stable ABI, you use the limited API. Of course Martin should confirm that this terminology matches his intentions.

cheers, Georg

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