I am one of the maintainer of Python on OpenVMS.

Building from time to time Python 2.4 from CVS
snapshot, I have just noticed that all the conditional
compilation against WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES has been
removed.

This is a major problem on OpenVMS.

VMS has a complex file system which is mostly record
oriented and not stream oriented (even if it support
stream oriented files, this is not the default).
For example it support the following record formats:
fixed-length, variable-length, variable with
fixed-length control, 3 stream format, etc...
The default is variable-length.

So reading (opening) text file, for example during a
import, in binary mode lead to incorrect results
because there are no '\n' or any character (or
combinaison of characters) at the end of the line.
If the file is not open in binary mode the VMS CRTL
automatically append a '\n' at the end of the record,
so all work correctly. This not the case in binary
mode, in this case the record is read as is, in fact
you even get the control part of the record for some
record format.

So, is it possible to maintain this test, even as
undocumented or is it acceptable to transform it into a
specific VMS test. But I suspect that other mainframe
file systems will have the same problem.

Thanks for any help.

Regards,

Jean-François