[Python-Dev] issue 9807 - a glitch in coexisting builds of different types

[Barry Warsaw]

On Oct 04, 2010, at 09:10 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

>On Mon, 4 Oct 2010 14:41:11 -0400
>Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
>> 
>> For a distro, all those Python binaries have to go in /usr/bin.  We
>> already symlink /usr/bin/python to pythonX.Y so I don't see the harm
>> in a few extra symlinks.
>
>Why would a distro want to provide all combinations of Python builds?

Maybe not all, but definitely several.  At least a normal build and a debug
build, but a wide unicode build possibly also.

>One important issue for me is guessability. While "d" is
>reasonably guessable (and "dbg" or "debug" would be even better), "u"
>and "m" are not.
>(actually, "u" could lead to misunderstandings such as "is this a
>unicode-enabled version of Python?"; as for "m", I don't know what it's
>for)

I think symlinks will make this discoverable.  I like that the binary name's
suffix flags matches the flags used in PEP 3149, which also makes it easy to
document.  I could imagine python3-dbg would be symlinked to python3.2d (or
whatever).

>As for the SOABI, you could use a different mangling which would
>preserve the ".so" suffix -- e.g. "-debug.so" instead of ".so.d". At
>least then well-known conventions would be preserved.

We already have libpython3.2.so.1.0 which also doesn't end in .so.  I suppose
we could put the build flags before the .so. part, but I think Matthias had a
problem with that (I don't remember the details).

-Barry
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