On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 10:58 PM, Zachary Ware <zachary.ware+pydev@gmail.com> wrote:
We actually have four separate copies of libffi:
Modules/_ctypes/libffi: This is a mostly-vanilla copy of libffi-3.1 (released 19May2014), lightly patched according to Modules/_ctypes/libffi.diff. This one is used for any non-OSX posix build that doesn't use
--with-system-ffi. doko has done a pretty good job keeping this one relatively up to date.
I've opened pull requests to the libffi repository for some of the changes (I haven't looked at the ones in configure{.ac} yet) in Modules/_ctypes/libffi.diff: https://github.com/atgreen/libffi/pulls/berkerpeksag
Modules/_ctypes/libffi_osx: This is a "lightly patched" copy from somewhere before libffi-2.0, probably. It has barely been touched since 2009. I've been given to understand that it has modifications necessary to allow building fat binaries on OSX (Ned or Ronald would know better than I), but I don't know if such modifications may have made it upstream since pre-2.0. This one is used for all OSX builds that don't use
--with-system-ffi.
I did a quick check and yes, some of them have already been upstreamed. For example, https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/9dc4e927f635a08ea236c9a1e5a32a99048...
Modules/_ctypes/libffi_arm_wince: I don't know why we even have this. Nobody has touched it since ctypes was merged into cpython in 2006.
I couldn't find any reference to Modules/_ctypes/libffi_arm_wince in the codebase so I guess we can now file an issue to remove it.
Thanks for the great summary, Zachary :)
--Berker