Re: Proposed Modules, My Take

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 20:28 +0000, Ross Burton wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 14:58 -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > New versions must not break ABI.  While PyGTK itself does not break, it
> > does heavily depend on the ABI of Python and that *does* break.
> 
> I may be wrong, but as I understand it Python doesn't really have an
> ABI.  .pyc files are cached bytecode which you could say are ABI but
> these are not part of the standard interface, are not distributed, etc.
> 
> As I see it the ABI question is not relevant for Python, the question
> should be is the API stable.

API basically equals ABI in Python terms.  Python *does* break both for
Python apps (features deprecated in 2.2 are removed in 2.3, and so on).
The Python version is also a lot like a library soname.  Imagine if
GNOME said that libxml is guaranteed to be available, and is guaranteed
to have a particular API, the symbols/behavior won't change, but it
might be called libxml.so.1 on one machine and libxml.so.30 on another.
Even though the API didn't change you are still then forced to recompile
your app for every target distro - that's especially silly when you're
using an interpreted language like Python.