[Python-Dev] please consider changing --enable-unicode default to ucs4

[James Y Knight]

On Sep 28, 2009, at 4:25 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> Distributions should really not be put in charge of upstream
> coding design decisions.

I don't think you can blame distros for this one....

 From PEP 0261:
     It is also proposed that one day --enable-unicode will just
     default to the width of your platforms wchar_t.

On linux, wchar_t is 4 bytes.

If there's a consensus amongst python upstream that all the distros  
should be shipping Python with UCS2 unicode strings, you should reach  
out to them and say this, in a rather more clear fashion. Currently,  
most signs point towards UCS4 builds as being the better option.

Or, one might reasonably wonder why UCS-4 is an option at all, if  
nobody should enable it.

> People building their own Python version will usually also build
> their own extensions, so I don't really believe that the above
> scenario is very common.

I'd just like to note that I've run into this trap multiple times. I  
built a custom python, and expected it to work with all the existing,  
installed, extensions (same major version as the system install, just  
patched). And then had to build it again with UCS4, for it to actually  
work. Of course building twice isn't the end of the world, and I'm  
certainly used to having to twiddle build options on software to get  
it working, but, this *does* happen, and *is* a tiny bit irritating.

James