[Python-Dev] Sharing expat instances

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:30 PM 12/15/2005 +0100, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> > I don't know.  I can see that the split makes sense for prefix/exec-prefix
> > distinctions, but then again, the disutils will install an entire
> > distribution in exec-prefix if it contains "impure" parts, so that's
> > certainly an option here.
> >
> > On the other hand, it's not clear to me *why* the lib-dynload/DLLs
> > directories exist, since it seems to me that that's what exec-prefix is
> > for.
>
>Can you please explain? exec_prefix will point to, say,
>/usr/i686; it shouldn't be that .so files are directly installed in
>that location. Instead, Python searches them in
>EXEC_PREFIX "/lib/python" VERSION "/lib-dynload".

Right; the question is why not just EXEC_PREFIX "/lib/python" VERSION 
instead.  What benefit does the separate directory offer?

Note that the distutils, when installing a package containing C extensions, 
will install to site-packages under sys.exec_prefix; it does not separate 
the C extensions into special alternate library directories.