[Python-Dev] LZMA compression support in 3.3

[Dan Stromberg]

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 1:21 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de>wrote:

> > I'd like to better understand why ctypes is (sometimes) frowned upon.
> >
> > Is it the brittleness?  Tendency to segfault?
>
> That, and Python should work completely if ctypes is not available.
>

What are the most major platforms ctypes doesn't work on?

It seems like there should be some way of coming up with an xml file
describing the types of the various bits of data and formal arguments -
perhaps using gccxml or something like it.

> FWIW, I have a partial implementation of a module that does xz from
> > Python using ctypes.
>
> So does it work on Sparc/Solaris? On OpenBSD? On ARM-Linux? Does it
> work if the xz library is installed into /opt/sfw/xz?
>

So far, I've only tried it on a couple of Linuxes and Cygwin.  I intend to
try it on a large number of *ix variants in the future, including OS/X and
Haiku.  I doubt I'll test OpenBSD, but I'm likely to test on FreeBSD and
Dragonfly again.

With regard to /opt/sfw/xz, if ctypes.util.find_library(library) is smart
enough to look there, then yes, xz_mod should find libxz there.

On Cygwin, ctypes.util.find_library() wasn't smart enough to find a Cygwin
DLL, so I coded around that.  But it finds the library OK on the Linuxes
I've tried so far.

(This is part of a larger project, a backup program.  The backup program has
been tested on a large number of OS's, but I've not done another broad round
of testing yet since adding the ctypes+xz code)
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