Writing a C extension - borrowed references

[Tom Evans]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 4:38 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> BTW, have you looked into Cython? It's smart enough to take care of a
> lot of this sort of thing for you.

I did a bit; this work is to replace our old python 2 SAML client,
which used python-lasso and python-libxml2, both packages that are
built as part of building the C library and thus an utter PITA to
package for different versions of python (something our Infra team
were extremely reluctant to do). When the latest (PITA to build)
version of python-lasso started interfering with python-xmlsec
(validating an invalid signature was causing segfaults), I got fed up
of fighting it.

I actually also maintain a C version of the same code, using the same
libraries, so porting those few segments of code to Python/C seemed
more expedient than rewriting in Cython. I'm not writing an API to
these libraries, just a few functions.

Cheers

Tom