[Python-Dev] issue 9807 - a glitch in coexisting builds of different types

[Barry Warsaw]

On Oct 04, 2010, at 10:18 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

>What is the point of shipping a different unicode representation? Is
>there any practical use case? I could understand a motivated user
>trying different build flags for the purpose of experimentation and
>personal enlightenment, but a Linux distribution?
>(also, Debian's Python already defaults on wide unicode)

True, it may not make sense to ship different unicode builds, but certainly it
makes sense to ship debug and non-debug builds.  But I don't think it makes
sense to special case that when we already handle the build flags according to
PEP 3149.

Also, I do think there is a valid use case for developers here.  I might
indeed want to install into /usr/local various different builds of Python for
testing purposes (e.g. user reported my extension module crashes when
--without-unicode --with-pydebug is given).

To me, we're mostly discussing user interface.  What binary names to we want
to present to the end user?  Through the use of symlinks we can present any
name we want.  I don't personally think having additional build-flagged names
hurts the user, but if there's strong disagreement, then I'm not opposed to
exposing them optionally through a configure flag and/or new Makefile target.
I just don't think it's necessary.

>> >As for the SOABI, you could use a different mangling which would
>> >preserve the ".so" suffix -- e.g. "-debug.so" instead of ".so.d". At
>> >least then well-known conventions would be preserved.
>> 
>> We already have libpython3.2.so.1.0 which also doesn't end in .so.
>
>".so.<number>" is a well-understood Unix convention, while
>".so.<some additional letters>" doesn't seem to be.
>(this also means that tools such as file managers etc. may not display
>the file type properly)

Okay.  I'll try to modify the patch to put the build-flags before the .so when
--enable-shared is given.

-Barry
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