[Python-ideas] Adding iOS/Android support to Python

[Andrew Barnert]

On Oct 26, 2014, at 16:35, Russell Keith-Magee <russell at keith-magee.com> wrote:

> Hi Todd,
> 
> On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 8:18 PM, Todd <toddrjen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Oct 25, 2014 10:13 AM, "Russell Keith-Magee" <russell at keith-magee.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Todd <toddrjen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Oct 25, 2014 4:22 AM, "Russell Keith-Magee" <russell at keith-magee.com> wrote:
>> >> >  3) Disabling certain modules on mobile platforms. Supporting modules like linuxaudiodev, ossaudiodev, readline, curses, idle and tkinter on mobile platforms doesn't make much sense; modules likes bsddb and bz2 are difficult to support due to library dependencies; and the need for modules like multiprocessing is arguable (and difficult to support on mobile). Even providing a Python executable/shell is arguable for these platforms.
>> >>
>> >> I would definitely be extremely interested in a python shell in android.  One thing I feel are lacking on android are good advanced mathematical tools and and python shell with appropriate libraries could make a very powerful open-source tool for that.  There have been some attempts at that already.
>> >
>> > Yes - and (to the best of my knowledge) none of them provide the default Python shell. They're custom user interfaces, using native system controls, that provide a shell-like UI. What I'm talking about here is the literal "python.exe" build target - the one that is an executable that starts and expects to attach to stdin/stdout. *That* executable isn't practical on Android *or* iOS, because neither platform has the concept of a "console" in the traditional Unix sense of the word.
>> 
>> Perhaps no console by default, but it is possible to have a traditional console on android.  I have one and many ROMs install one by default.  So although it may not be part of the default configuration I think it would be good to support it for the people who do have a console.
>> 
>> Further, with rooted users, python could be set up to be used with the built-in adb shell.
>> 
>> It is unclear from the discussion where things ultimately came out on this issue. If there still a possibility it might removed, although I understand that consoles are not the primary use-case, I think is still a valid use-case that should supported.
>> 
> Supporting rooted devices and "unix console on mobile device" features are of no interest to me personally; so I suppose the question is whether providing support for these use cases would be an impediment to a set of patches being added to Python's trunk.

I don't think it's so much people wanted to use the Unix console directly on their device, as wanting to use it when ssh'd into their device. I built 3.2 or 3.3 for iOS (on the device, using the tool chain from Cydia) just to make it usable in test scripts for an app I was working on. 

But that seems like a very different use case from people who want a cross-compilable framework that they can use in an app, that runs in the simulator, that has GUI libraries, etc. If it's that hard to support the interpreter, I think it would be reasonable to disable it, and let people who want that create a Cydia package separate from yours.
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