Library support for Python 3.x

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 3:37 PM, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> writes:
>> That's not windows specific - most packages which distribute binary
>> packages need to package binaries for every minor version (2.4, 2.5,
>> etc...)....
>> I doubt that's what Paul was referring to, though - he seemed more
>> concern with API/language changes than ABI issues.
>
> I didn't realize the ABI situation was that unstable.

Unstable may be strong - every minor version of python has a lifespan
of several years. But yes, that's an hindrance for packagers: you need
to package binaries for every minor version of python, although I
guess for trivial extensions, you may get away with it on some
platforms. That's why as far as I am concerned, something like PEP 384
worths more than any feature in py3k I am aware of. I think it will
have more impact than py3k's features for the scientific python, if
the stable API is rich enough. It would certainly make more incentive
for me to work on porting packages to py3k than just doing it because
we will have to at some point.

cheers,

David