[Python-Dev] towards a stricter definition of sys.executable (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Mar 16 20:29:50 CET 2006

At 07:40 PM 3/16/2006 +0100, Fredrik Lundh wrote:

Looks like I might have to withdraw my (d) proposal, and, once again, suggest that we stick to the "GetProgramFullPath" sense, as implemented, and add a new variable for the originally intended but not really implemented "GetInter- preterPath" sense...

Note that the stdlib and tools often use the (b) interpretation. For example, the distutils does byte-compilation of files by invoking sys.executable. So these would need to be changed. (This in fact is why I couldn't use exemaker to wrap easy_install on Windows and had to create my own wrapper that exec()'s Python rather than linking to it.)

Basically, no matter how this is clarified, some code somewhere is going to have to change.

(On the bright side, we could get rid of the distutils hack in 2.5 if compile() allowed you to set the optimization level.)

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