[Distutils] Disposition of C extensions and packages

[Guido van Rossum]

[Michael Sanner]
> What management are you talking about here ?? It seems to me that
> duplicate copies of identical files (one copy per platform) is
> inconvenient (at least for my perspective).

Suppose a new version of a package is released for platform X but not
yet for platform Y (maybe platform Y is less popular and the only
maintainer is on vacation).  Further suppose the platform-independent
files are changed in the new version.  Now if you install it in the
shared area for platform X, you screw platform Y's installation.
Without a shared area, each platform can update without affecting the
others.

> Moreover, why provide an prefix and an exec_prefix if we are going to put
> everything into the same tree anyway ??

They are old features; 5 years ago this was worth it to save 0.5 Mb of
disk space.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)