[Python-Dev] Getting python-bz2 into 2.3

[Bob Kline]

Earlier this month, Tim P. wrote:

> Semi-unfortunately, the author of that [bzip2] has
>
>     no idea if it actually works on 95/98/ME/NT/XP
>
> and in the docs for "3.8 Making a Windows DLL"
>
>     I haven't tried any of this stuff myself, but it all looks
>     plausible.
>
> That means it will require some real work to build and test this
> stuff on 6 flavors of Windows.  Not a showstopper, but does raise
> the bar for getting into the PLabs Windows distro.

Sorry if I'm way off base here, but does the underlying bzip2 package
have to be in a DLL, or can't that be built as a static library, which
gets linked into the .pyd, which *is* a DLL?  In either case, it doesn't
seem like it would be very difficult to create whatever flavor library
is needed.  The code for bzip2 seems to be very portably written.

The python-bz2 code, on the other hand, needed a little bit of tweaking
to make it compile with Microsoft's compiler.

I'll be happy to help in whatever way would be useful in dealing with
the "raised bar," as the prospect of having Python support on all
platforms for bz2 compression (and tarfiles) is very appealing.

-- 
Bob Kline
mailto:bkline@rksystems.com
http://www.rksystems.com