[Python-Dev] Sharing expat instances (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Dec 15 21:42:22 CET 2005

At 09:30 PM 12/15/2005 +0100, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Phillip J. Eby wrote: > I don't know. I can see that the split makes sense for prefix/exec-prefix > distinctions, but then again, the disutils will install an entire > distribution in exec-prefix if it contains "impure" parts, so that's > certainly an option here. > > On the other hand, it's not clear to me why the lib-dynload/DLLs > directories exist, since it seems to me that that's what exec-prefix is > for.

Can you please explain? execprefix will point to, say, /usr/i686; it shouldn't be that .so files are directly installed in that location. Instead, Python searches them in EXECPREFIX "/lib/python" VERSION "/lib-dynload".

Right; the question is why not just EXEC_PREFIX "/lib/python" VERSION instead. What benefit does the separate directory offer?

Note that the distutils, when installing a package containing C extensions, will install to site-packages under sys.exec_prefix; it does not separate the C extensions into special alternate library directories.

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