[Python-Dev] disable writing .py[co] (original) (raw)

Matthias Klose doko@cs.tu-berlin.de
Wed, 22 Jan 2003 01:21:53 +0100

Barry A. Warsaw writes:

=20 >>>>> "MvL" =3D=3D Martin v L=F6wis <martin@v.loewis.de> writes: =20 MvL> No need is real. The specific requirement comes from =20 MvL> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=3D96111 =20 MvL> where a user complains that mailman writes into /usr (writin= g MvL> actually failed, but a Secure Linux kernel detected the MvL> problem, and the user wants to silence the warning, MvL> implementing some policy). =20 MvL> It turns out that this is Python trying to write .pyc MvL> files. It would be desirable to turn pyc generation MvL> completely off for mailman. This could be done best through MvL> actually modifying the mailman source code. Setting an MvL> environment variable is less convenient, as you then have to=

MvL> find all places where mailman scripts are invoked, or have t= o MvL> wrap all mailman scripts. =20 That particular bug is because the debian package isn't/wasn't complete. In a from-source installation of Mailman, we do indeed run=

compileall.py on all the Python files. From skimming the debian bug report, it looks like they fixed their post-install script to do the same.

yes, but one file mm_cfg.py is a configuration file, which should not be compiled. This is not specific to mailman. A core configuration file is site.py, which shouldn't be compiled as well, so here it would make sense to use a sys..