[Python-Dev] LZMA compression support in 3.3

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Sun, 28 Aug 2011 01:52:51 +1000
Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The plausible story being that we basically wrap an existing library?
> > I don't think PyPy et al have pure Python versions of the zlib or
> > OpenSSL, do they?
> >
> > If we start taking PEP 399 conformance to such levels, we might as well
> > stop developing CPython.
> 
> It's acceptable for the Python version to use ctypes in the case of
> wrapping an existing library, but the Python version should still
> exist.

I think you're taking this too seriously. Our extension modules (_bz2,
_ssl...) are *already* optional even on CPython. If the library or its
development headers are not available on the system, building these
extensions is simply skipped, and the test suite passes nonetheless.
The only required libraries for passing the tests being basically the
libc and the zlib.

Regards

Antoine.