On 16 July 2013 14:08, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

PS There is still the proviso that I haven't tested my assumption that the separate 32 and 64 bit wrappers are *needed* (setuptools and distlib use them, so I think it's a valid assumption, but I need to test). I will try to get time to check that ASAP.

Hmm. I just did a quick test, and then based on the results checked the setuptools source code. I can see no reason why there needs to be 32 and 64 bit launcher exes. The launchers simply use CreateProcess to launch a separate Python process using the #! line of the script. So there's no DLL loading going on, and no reason that I can see for needing separate 32 and 64 bit builds.

Jason - can you shed any light on why there are separate builds for 32 and 64 bits?

Actually, the launcher is essentially identical to the "py" launcher for Windows, except that it gets a script name to execute from the name of the launcher. I'm wondering whether the correct approach here would be to enhance the launcher one more time to look for a suitably named script and auto-run it if it's present (i.e. merge the wrapper functionality into the launcher). Then we have a standard wrapper that everyone can use and not reinvent their own.

Paul