[Python-Dev] Removal of intobject.h in 3.1

[Mark Dickinson]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 10:44 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> Thanks for pointing me to the that ticket.
>
> Looks like Guido already commented on this, so intobject.h could
> be revived in some form.

I'm wondering how a resurrected intobject.h should be used:  would
Linux distributors (for example) package up intobject.h with the rest
of the python-devel RPM/package/whatever so that Python extension
modules could just include it directly, or would it be better to
encourage the extension writers to make a copy of intobject.h to add
to the source for their extension?

In the first case, intobject.h would become a requirement for those
extensions, so we'd presumably end up committed to either
maintaining intobject.h for the lifetime of Python 3.x, or causing
some pain when it does eventually get deleted.

I quite like Benjamin's suggestion (in the issue tracker) of putting
it in Doc/includes.

> Since this file would only be used by extension modules and possibly
> also include other helper macros, perhaps it'd be better to to rename
> the file to py2compat.h or something along those lines ?!
>
> We could then also have a py2compat.c to hold corresponding
> C code, e.g. to provide compatibility wrappers of new APIs that
> implement different semantics in 3.x.

This is also an interesting idea.

Mark