[PATCH 1 of 2] util: disable floating point stat times (issue4836)

[Sean Farley]

Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2015-11-24 at 17:56 -0600, Sean Farley wrote:
>> Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> writes:
>> 
>> > On Tue, 2015-11-24 at 13:32 -0500, timeless wrote:
>> > > > +# disable Python's problematic floating point timestamps
>> > > > (issue4836)
>> > > > +# (Python hypocritically says you shouldn't change this
>> > > > behavior
>> > > > in
>> > > > +# libraries, and sure enough Mercurial is not a library.)
>> > > 
>> > > Presumably this is because it's neither threadsafe (i.e. it's
>> > > process
>> > > global, not per-thread), nor compatible w/ multiple libraries
>> > > with
>> > > different opinions about the behavior. i.e. if one library needs
>> > > it
>> > > off and one library needs it on, the two libraries will break
>> > > each-other horribly.
>> > 
>> > It's obviously a bad idea for libraries to change this because
>> > programs
>> > don't expect it to change. But Python's os module is itself a
>> > library,
>> > so they're doing exactly what they tell people not to do.
>> > 
>> > (Admittedly, on a scale of compatibility breakage from 0 to 3000
>> > this
>> > doesn't rate very high.)
>> 
>> Even for the wsgi apps?
>
> Does Python or Python 3000 break wsgi apps? Yes. But I'm sure that's
> not actually your question.

I mean there are some wsgi apps that load Mercurial as a long-lived
process. Basically, a library (Bitbucket and Kallithea would be two
examples). Are we still going to change the global os module?