[Python-Dev] issue 9807 - a glitch in coexisting builds of different types (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Mon Oct 4 20:41:11 CEST 2010


On Oct 02, 2010, at 09:44 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

With my branch, you'll end up with this in /tmp/python:

bin/python3.2m - the normal build binary bin/python3.2dmu - the wide+pydebug build binary bin/python3.2m-config bin/python3.2dmu-config Do users really want to see such idiosyncratic suffixes? Ordinary users won't be building Python from source. Developers won't care so long as we clearly document the sundry suffixes and describe them in the README (or in a PEP, with a pointer from the README). I think this is not true. Developers will care, and they will cry foul very loudly, asking what nonsense this is. Antoine is proof of that: he is a developer, and he understands the motivation well, but it still goes against his notions of beauty (channeling him here).

Well, it may be surprising at first, but since it doesn't break any normal usage I don't think most developers will care. But I could be wrong.

Having multiple parallel "altinstall" installations be genuinely non-interfering out of the box certainly seems like a desirable feature to me. I think this should not use automatically generated suffixes, though. Perhaps I want an altinstall that is in some kind restrict? Or one where user "peter" has write access into site-packages?

I'm not sure how this relates to the suffix question...

I could accept that a suffix is parameter to configure (or some such), and then gets used throughout. By default, Python will not add a suffix. However, I still wonder why people couldn't just install Python in a different prefix if they want separate installations.

For a distro, all those Python binaries have to go in /usr/bin. We already symlink /usr/bin/python to pythonX.Y so I don't see the harm in a few extra symlinks.

However, if people really don't want to see this by default then I can think of a few options:

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