[Python-Dev] Difference between Include/internal and Include/cpython ?

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2019 23:22:25 +0100
Victor Stinner <vstinner at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi Antoine,
> 
> The rules to decide what goes where have been discussed in the issues which
> created Include/cpython/ and the issue moving more headers to
> Include/internal/.
> 
> In short, internal/ should not be used outside CPython codebase. In Python
> 3.7, these headers were even not installed. I chose to install them because
> I moved more headers into internal/ which is a backward incompatible
> change. You should not use these headers outside CPython code base, but the
> typical use case to use them are debug tools: debugger, tracer and
> profiler. The internal/ subdir is not included in Python default search
> path when you use python-config --cflags for example. It is a deliberate
> choice that these headers are not easily accessible.
> 
> There file names are prefixed by pycore_ for practical reasons: if 2 header
> files have the same name in internal/ and Include/, the C preprocessor can
> pick the wrong one. See the internal/ issue which gives a concrete example
> (but in Python 3.7).
> 
> cpython/ is just a practical separation to force developers to decide if a
> new API is part of the stable API or not. Previously, too many APIs have
> been added to the stable API by mistake (not on purpose).

Hmm, I see.  Thanks for the explanation.

Regards

Antoine.