Rebuilding extensions (was: python-dev summary)

[Tom Loredo]

Hi folks-

Michael, thank you very much for continuing the tradition that Andrew K.
started.  He did a great service for us non-dev types, and your
1st go at it was great, too.

Andrew D. notes:
> In fact, I just last week
> installed Python 2.1 from CVS.  Doing so reminded my why
> I don't like upgrading Python.  There was a change in
> the C level API which required a rebuild of all of my
> extensions.

This is a big nuisance for me.  I'm curious about what to expect in 
this regard.  Will every .X revision of Python require rebuilding
extensions, or is it required only when there are changes to
the C API?  If the latter, how likely is it that the C API will
*not* change between revisions?  I do a lot of scientific
computing with Python, on Solaris and MacOS boxes, and rely
heavily on C extensions for numerical computing.

Thanks,
Tom Loredo