[Python-Dev] mkdev, major, st_rdev, etc

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

After thinking for a while, and doing some research about these
functions, I've changed my mind about the best way to implement
the needed functionality for tarfile. Maybe including major,
minor, and makedev is the best solution. Some of the issues I'm
considering:

- st_rdev was already available in 2.2, so we'd have to introduce
  a new redundant pair attribute to provide a (major, minor) pair.
- mkdev would be able to use the standard posix format, and would
  work regardless of makedev's availability (mkdev is being
  introduced in 2.3).
- more flexible. major, minor, and makedev may be needed in other
  cases, besides st_rdev parsing and mknod device creation.
- TYPES.py is already trying to provide them, but it's broken
  (indeed, it's more broken than that. h2py should use cpp to
  preprocess the files, but that's something for another occasion).
- these "functions" are usually macros, thus should introduce
  little overhead.

A patch providing these functions is available at
http://www.python.org/sf/569139

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer

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