[Python-Dev] versioned .so files for Python 3.2

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jun 25, 2010, at 12:35 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

>Scott Dial wrote:
>> On 6/24/2010 5:09 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>>>> What use case does this address?
>>>
>>>> If you want to make it so a system can install a package in just one
>>>> location to be used by multiple Python installations, then the version
>>>> number isn't enough.  You also need to distinguish debug builds, profiling
>>>> builds, Unicode width (see issue8654), and probably several other
>>>> ./configure options.
>>>
>>> This is a good point, but more easily addressed.  Let's say a distro makes
>>> three Python 3.2 variants available, one "normal" build, a debug build, and
>>> UCS2 and USC4 versions of the above.  All we need to do is choose a different
>>> .so ABI tag (see previous follow) for each of those builds.  My updated patch
>>> (coming soon) allows you to define that tag to configure.  So e.g.
>> 
>> Why is this use case not already addressed by having independent
>> directories? And why is there an incentive to co-mingle these
>> version-punned files with version-agnostic ones?
>
>I don't think this is a good idea. After a while your Python
>lib directories would need some serious dusting off to make them
>maintainable again.
>
>Disk space is cheap so setting up dedicated directories for each
>variant will result in a much easier to manage installation.
>
>If you want a really clever setup, use hard links between those
>directory (you can also use symlinks if you like).
>Then a change in one Python file will automatically
>propagate to all other variant dirs without any maintenance
>effort. Together with PYTHONHOME this makes a really nice
>virtualenv-like environment.

Note that I do believe there is a difference between what users maintaining
their own Python installations might want, and what a distro needs to maintain
its entire Python stack.  So while dedicated directories might make more sense
if you're maintaining your own Python built from source, it doesn't make as
much sense for a distro, as described in previous responses by Matthias.

-Barry

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