[Python-ideas] win32 extensions

[Brian Curtin]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 23:13, Matt Joiner <anacrolix at gmail.com> wrote:
> pywin32 gives you full access to the Windows kernel interface. The
> same functionality is not bundled in the standard library for Linux.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't exist.

> To use Massimo's example regarding file locking, just this morning I
> had to write a ctypes wrapper around struct flock for this purpose
> because the fcntl module is only a partial implementation. If the full
> Windows API is made available, you might as well complete some of
> those half-done modules now that the single biggest sore thumb
> (Windows) for OS interfaces will be laid bare.
>
> Python is well respected for its cross platform support. Making
> bindings available in both cross platform and native forms will
> greatly improve uptake of Python. My thoughts are that more effort
> should be made to completely expose Unix/Linux/Mac interfaces before
> (or simultaneously) with making the entire Windows API available.

Mark or someone could probably answer this question in a second, but
I've tried to find a date for when pywin32 was first released, which
is kind of tough. win32all build 135 added Python 2.0 support, which
was released in October 2000, so I suspect that build occurred close
to that time. There are 29 releases listed before that one on
http://python.net/crew/mhammond/win32/RecentChangeHistory.html (and
potentially more elsewhere, as the list only goes to 106), all going
back to the Python 1.x times.

Do we really need to hold back a 10+ year old project because no one
thought to do the same thing for other platforms? I don't disagree
that having bindings for all popular platforms is a good thing, but
we'll be on Python 5 by the time we can wrangle up people to write all
of that code, maintain it, and watch it mature while helping it find
wide reaching adoption.

Mark released the book "Python Programming on Win32" in January 2000,
which I still have on my desk despite it barely surviving a flooded
basement, and it's almost all based on this package. It was mature
enough even then to write most of a 600+ page book with, which puts it
in a very small camp of projects.