Re: Proposed Modules, My Take

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 15:35 -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 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

For certain values of "break". The application continues to work if the
application specifies a certain version of python, as it should. I wish
that python did not allow applications not to specify a version, but
it's not the first development environment to make it easy for people to
make mistakes. I think that Java needs the same attention.
 
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com