Skip Montanaro wrote:
MS believes that Python is the application. Those of us writing Python programs view those programs as the applications, not the Python interpreter per se.
I think this is a good point. Windows app programmers (mostly) view Python as part of their app and try it install it in their app directory. Unix installs Python as a system app in multiple versions and users use PATH to pick a version. Unix users view the Python interpreter as a system service which is needed for running their app. I think this is because a Windows app is a visual program, and the Python release compiles to a console app (not really a visual program). So all (?most) Windows Python apps are custom mains with Python as a component, but the stock python.exe is not the main. This makes it difficult to document a way to install Python in the Unix fashion, since all apps need their own binary main and python15.dll is the only thing in common. IMHO archive files can solve this a lot more simply. JimA