[Python-Dev] disable writing .py[co]

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Traditionally, this has been the area of environment variables (tested
> at the time when main() parses its arguments) and command line
> options.  Do you really need to be able to control this dynamically
> during program execution?

No need is real. The specific requirement comes from

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=96111

where a user complains that mailman writes into /usr (writing actually 
failed, but a Secure Linux kernel detected the problem, and the user 
wants to silence the warning, implementing some policy).

It turns out that this is Python trying to write .pyc files. It would be 
desirable to turn pyc generation completely off for mailman. This could 
be done best through actually modifying the mailman source code. Setting 
an environment variable is less convenient, as you then have to find all 
places where mailman scripts are invoked, or have to wrap all mailman 
scripts.

Of course, if people think YAGNI, this could be left out in 2.3 and only 
be added in 2.4 if there is high demand.

Regards,
Martin