[Python-Dev] Getting python-bz2 into 2.3

[Tim Peters]

[Bob Kline]
> Earlier this month, Tim P. wrote:
>
>> Semi-unfortunately, the author of that [bzip2] has
>>
>>     no idea if it actually works on 95/98/ME/NT/XP
>>
>> and in the docs for "3.8 Making a Windows DLL"
>>
>>     I haven't tried any of this stuff myself, but it all looks
>>     plausible.
>>
>> That means it will require some real work to build and test this
>> stuff on 6 flavors of Windows.  Not a showstopper, but does raise
>> the bar for getting into the PLabs Windows distro.


> Sorry if I'm way off base here, but does the underlying bzip2 package
> have to be in a DLL, or can't that be built as a static library, which
> gets linked into the .pyd, which *is* a DLL?  In either case, it doesn't
> seem like it would be very difficult to create whatever flavor library
> is needed.  The code for bzip2 seems to be very portably written.
>
> The python-bz2 code, on the other hand, needed a little bit of tweaking
> to make it compile with Microsoft's compiler.
>
> I'll be happy to help in whatever way would be useful in dealing with
> the "raised bar," as the prospect of having Python support on all
> platforms for bz2 compression (and tarfiles) is very appealing.

This work has already been completed; current CVS Python has full bz2
support for Windows.