[Python-Dev] LZMA compression support in 3.3

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Sat, 27 Aug 2011 18:50:40 +0200
Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

> 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.

...and, apparently, pyexpat...