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[Python-Dev] pysqlite for 2.5?

Gerhard Häring gh at ghaering.de
Thu Mar 30 17:28:24 CEST 2006 
M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> [...]
> Also your statement regarding sqlite3 suggests that sqlite
> itself is not included - why not ?

- SQLite sources are 1.57 MiB uncompressed, we wouldn't want to add that 
to the Python sources download size, would we?
- I personally would not want to have the job to "bless" a certain 
version of SQLite for being bugfree enough to be used until the next 
Python minor release. And we wouldn't want to push a Python minor 
release just somebody found an obscure data corroption bug in a SQLite 
release
- SQLite might not compile on some less common platforms (AIX, HP/UX, 
Win64, whatever) that Python compiles fine on.
- I believe Python is written in more portable C than SQLite. So it 
might be certain compilers that fail for compiling SQLite.
- At some point you might also want a sqlite commandline shell instead 
of just the shared library, too.

All of these are non-issues if we just compile against an installed 
SQLite on Unix-like system if it can be found.

On Windows, I also prefer to have a dynamically linked SQLite Python 
module. We can distribute the SQLITE3.DLL with Python, and then people 
could just download an updated SQLITE.DLL from http://sqlite.org/ and 
overwrite the existing one of the Python installation, *if* an important 
bug is fixed in SQLite.

> Isn't the main argument for having pysqlite included in the
> core to be able to play around with SQL without relying
> on external libraries ?

This, and that you can prototype without having to install and configure 
a database server. For many applications, the prototype can be the final 
version.

-- Gerhard
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