[capi-sig] Unicode compatibility

[Daniel Stutzbach]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 5:45 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

> However, rather than using a distutils options to specify enable
> the agnostic mode, I would presume that extension writers simply
> write:
>
> #define _Py_UNICODE_AGNOSTIC 1
> #include "Python.h"
>
> in their code and then add
>
> [build_ext]
> unicode-agnostic=1
>
> to their setup.cfg.
>

I think I was much too vague when I said "distutils option".  I fear that I
implied a command-line option, which is not at all what I intended.  I was
picturing that the module author would include something like the following
in their setup.py:

    Extension("foo", ["foo.c"], unicode_agnostic=True)

which would arrange to add _Py_UNICODE_AGNOSTIC to their define_macros.  The
module author would not (and should not) define the macro themselves at the
top of a .c file.  By enabling it in setup.py, we guarantee that it will be
defined when compiling all of the module's .c files or not at all.


> Rather than waiting for package managers to include support
> for this (I've been trying to get some awareness for this problem
> for years, without much success), it's probably better to just fix
> distutils to include a UCS2/UCS4 marker in the platform string.
>

In principle, I agree.  I don't personally have enough familiarity with the
innards of distutils to feel comfortable writing a patch that alters the
platform string.
--
Daniel Stutzbach, Ph.D.
President, Stutzbach Enterprises, LLC <http://stutzbachenterprises.com>