On 11:45 pm, barry@python.org wrote:

I keep thinking I'd like to treat the OS as just another application, so that there's nothing special about it and the same infrastructure could be used for other applications with lots of entry level scripts.

I agree. The motivation here is that the "OS" application keeps itself separate so that incorrect changes to configuration or installation of incompatible versions of dependencies don't break it. There are other applications which also don't want to break. This is a general problem with Python, one that should be solved with a comprehensive parallel installation or "linker" which explicitly describes dependencies and allows for different versions of packages. I definitely don't think that this sort of problem should be solved during the *standardization* process - that should just describe the existing conventions for packaging Python stuff, and the OS can insulate itself in terms of that. Definitely it shouldn't be changed as part of standardization unless the distributors are asking for it loudly.