> > There are differents examples:
> >  - LONG_MAX is 9223372036854775807 even on 32 bits system
> >  - On Mac OS X, FAT programs contains 32 and 64 binaries, whereas
> >  constants are changed for 32 or 64 bits
> 
> That's because the h2py.py script doesn't know anything about conditional
> definitions, e.g.
> 
> PTRDIFF_MIN = (-9223372036854775807-1)
> PTRDIFF_MAX = (9223372036854775807)
> PTRDIFF_MIN = (-2147483647-1)
> PTRDIFF_MAX = (2147483647)

Why may fix h2py.py, but regenerating plat-*/*.py files on build is not an 
option according to Martin (msg145659).

And it doesn't solve the Mac OS X issue.

> Not all constants are really useful because of this, but some are, e.g.
> INT16_MAX, INT32_MAX, etc.

INT16_MAX and INT32_MAX are not platform dependent. I'm not sure that Python 
should provide such constants.

> Right, the modules are not tested at all, AFAIK.

One more reason to remove them. By the way, there are not documented.

> > The Python socket modules contain many constants (SOCK_*, AF_*,  SO_*,
> > ...): http://docs.python.org/library/socket.html#socket.AF_UNIX
> 
> True, but you probably agree that it's easier to parse a header file
> into a Python module than to add each and every socket option on
> the planet to the C socket module, don't you ? :-)

It's not exactly the purpose of this issue. We are first trying to get correct 
constants.

I don't think that it's really useful to expose all constants. I prefer to 
expose more constants on demand. When we add new constants, we try to use it, 
test it and document it (e.g. O_CLOEXEC).

> > Which constants are used by the ctypes modules or can be used by modules
> > using ctypes? Can you give examples? I listed usages of plat-* modules
> > in the first message of my thread on python-dev.
> 
> Not constants used by the ctypes, but constants which can be used
> with the ctypes module.

Sorry, I don't see which constants are useful with the ctypes module?

> > By "ldd", you mean "ld.so" (dlopen)?
> 
> Yes.

See my issue #13226 for these constants.

> Also note that the plat-* directories can contain platform specific code,
> e.g. the OS2 dirs have replacements for the pwd and grp modules.

(OS/2 has been deprecated in Python 3.3, see the PEP 11.)

Except plat-os2emx, I don't see other platform specific code.