Tim just pointed this thread out to me, so I thought I would try and keep it alive :) [Fred wrote]
--sigh--
So as I understand it, you'd need an extension to be left on for .pyw scripts, but could tolerate removal of extensions for other scripts. This is a distinct case from other Unixes and from Windows.
I have a patch that will strip extensions for POSIX platforms other than Darwin (including Mac OS X), only if "build_scripts --strip-extensions" is used. Given the special cases and another issue related to legacy support, I'm not going to apply the patch.
The other issue is one of supporting scripts that want to keep their extension (because they need to be command-line compatible with how they were previously installed) at the same time as providing scripts with extensions stripped by default. My own expectation is that I'd want to ship a setup.cfg file that set this by default, but I'd want to exclude specific scripts. This indicates that the simple model of a boolean flag isn't sufficient.
How about something like: strip_extensions = {"posix": "txt py pyw", "darwin": "txt" } Where strip_extensions is a dictionary, keyed by the platform name (either sys.platform or os.name - whatever makes sense. The value is the list of extensions that should be stripped. This allows README.FIRST etc to remain intact, and allows fine control over what platforms it is applied to. The downside is that it can't really be spelt on the command-line. However, I argue that anyone who needs such fine grained control will have somewhere more suitable to specify it anyway. Would that make sense? Mark.