Python 2.0 naive question

[David Bolen]

"Fredrik Lundh" <effbot at telia.com> writes:

> Tim Roberts wrote:
(...)
> > Is there a downside to moving from 1.5.2 to 2.0b1?  I run Python both on
> > Win32 and on Linux.  Are .pyd files upward compatible
> 
> Nope.  Old PYD files will pull in the wrong Python DLL,
> which causes Python to crash.

Is there any chance at a succinct summary as to why this can't be
fixed in 2.0 (not the incompatibility, but crashing rather than
identifying the mismatch and raising an exception)?

I tried to follow the majority of posts on this subject on python-dev,
but while I can understand the difficulty in terms of trying to make
extensions work across versions, I can't see why later versions of
Python couldn't simply export a marker so that during the import (but
before any actual extension functions were called), Python could
determine if the extension was from an older version and just abort
the import.

True, it wouldn't solve any cross-version compatibility, but surely it
would be much better than a crash, no?

--
-- David
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