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Author vstinner
Recipients Link Mauve, loewis, pitrou, serhiy.storchaka, vstinner
Date 2015-03-23.21:05:20
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Message-id <1427144720.2.0.99259817761.issue22623@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
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> Many POSIX functions aren’t available on every system, especially embedded ones.

What do you call "embedded systems"? I worked on set top boxes (the box to watch television) between 2011 and 2013 and we had a regular Linux kernel with all POSIX functions. Most of the time, the CPU was a slow MIPS. The tool chain was based on GCC. For some hardware, we used the µlibc but this C library provides all functions required by Python.

> Personally, I'd rather answer that it's not our problem if some systems are not POSIX-compliant. Maintainers of such systems can always maintain a patch to disable the missing functionality. Adding conditionals everywhere has a non-trivial maintenance cost.

I agree. Anyway, in the embedded world, softwares are usually old and heavily patched. For example, in 2013 we still used Python 2.5.2 with a lot of patches. For example, patches for cross compilation. But also backported features like HTTP Keep-Alive or HTTPS checks.

Technically, you can easily fork Python repository and keep your patches up to date using rebase.

We defined better rules to support officially a platform. A requirement is for example to have a buildbot running tests daily on the platform. I'm not sure that you are able to host a public buildbot for each custom embedded platform...

Android looks a more important target and it was already discussed to setup a Android buildbot.

I'm in favor of *dropping* all these annoying #ifdef because it's harder to review, maintain and debug such code. Here is my contribution: issue #23753 "Drop HAVE_FSTAT: require fstat() to compile/use Python". A concrete example: we are working on a Python implementation of io.FileIO and I don't want to see hasattr(os, 'fstat') in the Python code because it has a performance cost *at runtime* (see issue #21859).

See also the new Mobile-SIG mailing list which is maybe more appropriate to discuss such changes:
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-sig
History
Date User Action Args
2015-03-23 21:05:20vstinnersetrecipients: + vstinner, loewis, pitrou, serhiy.storchaka, Link Mauve
2015-03-23 21:05:20vstinnersetmessageid: <1427144720.2.0.99259817761.issue22623@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
2015-03-23 21:05:20vstinnerlinkissue22623 messages
2015-03-23 21:05:20vstinnercreate