Xavier de Gaye writes:
It would be useful to know the other reasons why a sourceless distribution is discouraged,
I wouldn't say it's discouraged, except for the ethical reason that Python is open source, and we love the idea that our users can hack Python for their own needs. That, of course, is balanced by the fact that sourceless distribution is exactly such a derivative. But I don't see why maintaining a sourceless distribution is an appropriate use of core developer time. On the one hand, it seems to be something that can be done separately from the core, and there are already many examples. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be demand for a "generic" sourceless distribution -- removing source is the *easy* part. In fact there are many use cases that *need* variants, so it seems to me that it would be likely to be a real hairball of optional features. For example, as Terry mentioned not all applications need the unicodedata module, and it's *big*, but many applications I can imagine doing myself (spam-checking and other validation of textual data) would include it. Steve