[Python-Dev] RE: [Idle-dev] Forward progress with full backward compatibility

[bwarsaw@cnri.reston.va.us]

>>>>> "GL" == Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph@twistedmatrix.com> writes:

    BAW> sys.hexversion?

    GL> Thank you!

    GL> I stand corrected (and embarrassed) but perhaps this could be
    GL> a bit better documented?  a search of Google comes up with
    GL> only one hit for this on the entire web:
    GL> http://www.python.org/1.5/NEWS-152b2.txt ...

Yup, it looks like it's missing from Fred's 1.6 doc tree too.

Do python-devers think we also need to make the other patchlevel.h
constants available through sys?

If so, and because sys.hexversion is currently undocumented, I'd
propose making sys.hexversion a tuple of

    (PY_VERSION_HEX, PY_MAJOR_VERSION, PY_MINOR_VERSION,
     PY_MICRO_VERSION, PY_RELEASE_LEVEL, PY_RELEASE_SERIAL)

or leaving sys.hexversion as is and crafting a new sys variable which
is the [1:] of the tuple above.

Prolly need to expose PY_RELEASE_LEVEL_{ALPHA,BETA,GAMMA,FINAL} as
constants too.

-Barry