[Python-Dev] bdist_* to stdlib?

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Fri Feb 17 23:58:34 CET 2006


On 2/17/06, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > On 2/16/06, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> >>/usr/share often is on a different mount; that's the whole rationale
> >>for /usr/share.
> >
> > I don't think I've worked at a place where something like that was
> > done for at least 10 years. Isn't this argument outdated?
>
> It still *is* the rationale for putting things into /usr/share,
> even though I agree that probably nobody actually does that.
>
> That, in turn, is because nobody is so short of disk space that
> you really *have* to share /usr/share across architectures, and
> because trying to do the sharing still causes problems (e.g.
> what if the packaging systems of different architectures
> all decide to put the same files into /usr/share?)

I believe /usr/share was intended only to be used for
platform-independent files (e.g. docs, or .py files).

Another reason why nobody does this is because NFS is slow and
unreliable. It's no fun when your NFS server goes down and your
machine hangs because someone wanted to save 50 MB per workstation by
sharing it.

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


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