[Python-Dev] PEP 384 status

[Antoine Pitrou]

Hello Martin,

On Sat, 28 Aug 2010 12:04:10 +0200
"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> I have now started an initial patch for PEP 384, in the pep-0384 branch.
[...]

On http://bugs.python.org/issue9778 you elaborated on what the PEP would
entail in its current state:

“No, vice versa. The PEP promises that the ABI won't change until
Python 4. For any change that might break the ABI, either a
backwards-compatible solution needs to be found, or the change be
deferred to Python 4.”

This sounds like it could be detrimental by blocking desired
improvements (the aforementioned issue is a potential example of this).

Do you think it would complicate things a lot to version the ABI itself?
Actually, PYTHON_API_VERSION is already used as some kind of ABI tag
(since it's checked at module load time rather than at compile time).

Regards

Antoine.