On Tue, 4 Jun 2002, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
"AMK" == Andrew Kuchling
writes: AMK> On Fri, May 31, 2002 at 01:43:24PM -0400, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
Good point. Is the core API documented anywhere? I can't tell what is intended to be part of the API and what is accidentally exposed by the implementation.
AMK> No reference docs were ever written, AFAIK, so we'll just have AMK> to follow Python convention: methods prefixed with an AMK> underscore are private, otherwise public.
I'm wondering more about the goal of preserving backwards compatibility of an undocumented interface for extension writers. How many extensions have been written? Do we have any idea how many people use this or would be affected?
If it's just a handful of people, I wonder if it would be easier to trying to define a small API that they can rely on and give up on backwards compatibility.
For your information, the module scipy_distutils from the SciPy (www.scipy.org) package extends distutils quite a bit: it provides definitions for a dozen of Fortran 77/90/95 compilers from different vendors, it supports compilation of Fortran sources and building (automatically generated) extension modules to wrap Fortran and C libraries, etc. To achieve all that many hooks from the standard distutils needed to be extended and I cannot imagine if all that could have be done using just a "small" API (whatever that would be). However, I don't know what kind of changes are you planning and therefore I am not sure if they would have any impact to scipy_distutils. Hopefully it will be positive in the sense that it would work with Python versions starting from 2.1 and ending with the latest. So, some backwards compatibility is appreciated. What is the definition of handful people? Do you count extension developers or the users of these extensions? If the later, one would really need lots of hands when considering the current user base of SciPy alone (to give some idea, currently there are more than 100 subscribers to the scipy users mailing list formed in less than one year). Regards, Pearu