[Python-ideas] Error messages for shared libraries for other platform

[random832 at fastmail.us]

On Mon, Aug 5, 2013, at 2:01, Ryan wrote:
>  if ex.string == '%1 is not...:

ex.winerror == 193, surely. The message probably differentiates by
locale, and doing this kind of thing is fragile.

For your POSIX case, it looks like the underlying error (likely errno ==
ENOEXEC) is being caught and wrapped up in an ImportError at some lower
level, which apparently isn't being done on windows for whatever reason.
So maybe this code should A) have an analogous version written on
windows and B) have a more clear error message

It's possible that either or both of these cases can't distinguish
between attempting to load a library of the wrong architecture, and
simply loading a file that is corrupt or simply not a DLL/.so file at
all. Have you tried doing so? It _might_ still be a common enough case
to be worthwhile to go fishing for evidence that it's the case after
getting a generic error that could be that or could be something else,
but that's different from just unconditionally rewriting the error
message.