On 8/7/07, "Martin v. Löwis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > This means that I can't distribute Python extensions as binaries. > > I think this conclusion is completely wrong. Why do you come to it? > > If you want to distribute extension modules for Ubuntu, just distribute > the UCS-4 module. You need separate binary packages for different > microprocessors and operating systems, anyway, as you can't use the > same binary for Windows, OSX, Ubuntu, or Solaris.
You're right that we already have to provide several binaries (although OSX and Windows users usually aren't all that interested in running Unix desktop environments like ROX ;-), but each new combination is more work for us. Linux/x86 covers pretty much all our non-technical users, I think. Autopackage double-compiles C++ programs (C++ being the other piece of Linux infrastructure with an unstable ABI), for example, but if they want to provide binaries for a C++ program using Python, that's 4 binaries per architecture! (You also have to special-case the selection logic. Every installation system understands about different versions and different processors, but they need custom code to figure out which of two flavours of Python is installed). > > Any extension built on Ubuntu may fail on some other system. > > Every extension built on Ubuntu *will* fail on other processors > or operating systems - even if the Unicode issue was solved, it > would still be a different instruction set (if you x85 vs. SPARC > or Itanium, say), > and even for a single microprocessor, it will > fail if the OS ABI is different (different C libraries etc). Generally it doesn't. Our ROX-Filer/x86 binary using GTK+ runs on all Linux/x86 systems (as far as I know). Linux binary compatibility is currently very good, provided you avoid C++ and Python extensions. > Now, you seem to talk about different *Linux* systems. On Linux, > use UCS-4. Yes, that's what we want. But Python 2.5 defaults to UCS-2 (at least last time I tried), while many distros have used UCS-4. If Linux always used UCS-4, that would be fine, but currently there's no guarantee of that. -- Dr Thomas Leonard http://rox.sourceforge.net GPG: 9242 9807 C985 3C07 44A6 8B9A AE07 8280 59A5 3CC1 _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
