[Python-Dev] Pronouncement needed in issue9675

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Sep 28 18:32:03 CEST 2010


On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 8:18 AM, David Malcolm <dmalcolm at redhat.com> wrote:
[...]
> This breaks quite a few third-party modules, some with segfaults; we (as
> in Fedora) ran into this building with 2.7 as the
> standard /usr/bin/python for Fedora 14.
>
> We fixed some of them, but are advising people not to turn on warnings
> as errors in our release notes [1]

Sure, but do realize that if an extension segfaults when warnings are
turned into errors, that is ultimately a bug in the extension, and an
indication that the extension is playing loose with error checking.
There are likely other places where the module's error checking is
*also* too loose, and this can be a cause of general instability (e.g.
segfaulting instead of raising an exception when other rare errors
occur, e.g. interrupts or out of memory or even I/O errors).

> See this tracker bug for a survey of the gory details:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=620842&hide_resolved=0
>
> The list includes SWIG, numpy, and the GTK stack.

TBH, I'm not surprised. Those are very large code bases, and SWIG in
particular is by its nature limited in the amount of error checking it
can provide (as the error checking sometimes has to be in the C++ code
it wraps).

> I'd be more than happy to patch Fedora's python builds to remove the
> deprecation warning, but I don't want to stray too far from python.org's
> "official" behavior here.
>
> So, I'm +1 on removing this deprecation warning in 2.7, FWIW (though I'm
> not a committer yet)

FWIW, you don't have to be a committer for your +1 to count. But you
do have to provide additional argumentation, which you did. (IOW thank
you!)

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)


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