David Cournapeau, 28.01.2010 09:54: > On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Stefan Behnel wrote: > >> That doesn't completely match my experience. It's true that there is no >> guarantee that the ABI will stay compatible, but when you compile lxml >> against Py2.4 on a 32bit machine, it will continue to import in Py2.5 and >> (IIRC) Py2.6. It won't be as fast and it won't use some newer features, but >> it will work. Don't remember my experience with 2.3, though. > > Importing fine is a very low expectation for ABI compatibility :)
Ok, I should have said "imports and runs its test suite successfully". I just wanted to add a "works for me" to counter your rather pessimistic comments. > Since python does not make ABI guarantees between minor releases, you > don't know whether some structures layouts are changed between > versions, and in general, tracking crashes due to those is no fun. It > really depends on how much you depend on the C API, but for something > extensive like NumPy, I don't think it would ever work. I wouldn't be so sure that NumPy is so much more "extensive" in C-API usage than lxml. > So yes, you could say "just try and if it crashes, check that it is > not ABI-related". In practice, this is very poor engineering in my > book... Well, I don't know if there is any 'official' core developer statement regarding ABI compatibility, but I know that Guido doesn't take it easy to break it for a release. He tried pretty hard to keep it up for 2.5->2.6, at least, even if he was aware that it would be futile for 2.x->3.x. Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
