[Python-Dev] Supporting Third Party Modules (was The other Py2.4 issue)

[Bob Ippolito]

On Dec 12, 2004, at 1:09 PM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

> Bob Ippolito wrote:
>> Yes, of course, I was talking about the executable, not extensions.  
>> On Mac OS X 10.3+, the linker flag -undefined dynamic_lookup allows 
>> extensions to link to no Python whatsoever.
>
> It's the same on SysV ELF shared libraries, and in most other unices.
>
>> The extensions will just find the symbols it needs from some other 
>> image already loaded into the process at runtime.  If it weren't for 
>> the "forced" ABI incompatibility, we'd already have extensions that 
>> work cross-Python-major-version (assuming they used a safe subset of 
>> functions and structures).
>
> Are you talking about a forced ABI incompatibility, beyond the Windows
> issue of linking with a specific pythonxy.dll?
>
> On Unix, you certainly can have extensions across Python major 
> versions.

I was talking about PYTHON_API_VERSION, hence "forced" in quotes.  
Nobody likes to see an ugly error message.

-bob