[Python-Dev] Addition of "pyprocessing" module to standard lib.

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 10:32:30AM +0200, Ulrich Berning wrote:
> As long as the ctypes extension doesn't build on major Un*x platforms 
> (AIX, HP-UX), I don't like to see ctypes dependend modules included into 
> the stdlib. Please keep the stdlib as portable as possible.
> More and more people tend to say "Runs on Un*x" when they really mean 
> "Tested on Linux". Un*x is not Linux.

Python development doesn't seem to have any volunteers who use AIX or
HP-UX and can fix bugs on these platforms.  Searching bugs.python.org,
I find about 20 open AIX issues, 4 or 5 HP-UX issues, 6 IRIX bugs, and
about 15 Solaris bugs; but I don't know if any of the developers here
use these platforms.  (There is a Solaris buildbot, at least.)

This means that if people didn't use ctypes and wrote C extension
modules instead, those extension modules probably wouldn't work on AIX
and HP-UX either.  I'd rather see a standard library that's as
featureful and useful as possible, and not constrain it in order to
support platforms that we don't really seem to be supporting anyway.

There's a bug report about ctypes on AIX (1637120) and an old one
about ctypes on Solaris that looks like it's fixed, but I can't find a
report for HP-UX.  Part of the problem seems to be that libffi is
written for GCC, so using the vendor compiler often causes
difficulties.

--amk