[Cython] [PATCH] RFC: constify Cython output all over the place (newbie approach)

[Kirill Smelkov]

В сообщении от Среда 14 мая 2008 Lisandro Dalcin написал(a):
> On 5/14/08, Kirill Smelkov <kirr at mns.spb.ru> wrote:
> >  You know, when developing code, it is very tedious to look for meaningful
> >  errors and warnings in presence of tons of noise like
> >     warning: deprecated conversion from string constant to ‘char*’
> 
> Indeed!

Abolutely! :)


> >  And you know what? It seems in the next version of gcc, this deprecation
> >  warnings will be turned into errors.
> >  Python sources already use 'const' keyword freely, so I think it's time to add
> >  constify bits all over the place.
> 
> Still Python sources does not use const at all the places they should.
> If that's the future of GCC, then Python 2.X series is going to need
> special compiler flags to disable this error. And I did not reviewed
> the status of Python 3

I have whole Python as HG repo here, and recently I investigated
release25-maint and py3k branches regarding const usage.

I can say const is there (more in py3k), but a lot of places needs conversion too.

> If you feel confident and have the time, try to build python 3 from
> sources using the -Wwrite-strings option for GCC. And if you are
> completelly sure that this will be and error in future GCC's, I
> believe you should warn about this in Python-Dev list...

I'm not confident :), and unfortunately my time is very limited.

Also I don't know for sure about gcc, but at least it is their practice
to remove deprecated features in a near release.

Look e.g. here:

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html

"""
* The command-line option -fconst-strings, deprecated in previous GCC releases, has been removed.
"""

> Some time agoo I tried to patch python2.6 so fix the 'const' issue.
> But it turned that this were going to introduce heavy source code
> compatibility problems in extension modules written for the 2.X
> series, so I give up.

Here are 'const'-relevant Python issues:

http://bugs.python.org/issue2758
http://bugs.python.org/issue1772673
http://bugs.python.org/issue1699259
http://bugs.python.org/issue1866

So maybe let's discuss this topic here, and come to some consensus, and then
maybe try to push python-dev again?

Kirill.