[Python-Dev] Python launcher command line usage (Was: 3.2.1 encoding surprise)

[Terry Reedy]

On 7/19/2011 12:21 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
> On 19 July 2011 16:16, Antoine Pitrou<solipsis at pitrou.net>  wrote:
>> On Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:00:57 +0100

>> Perhaps this could be changed? As far as I can see, python.exe is
>> a small executable around ~25KB (all the code being in the DLL), so
>> there doesn't seem to be any harm to make a copy of it named either
>> pythonXY.exe or pythonX.Y.exe.
>
> I'm sure it could (and in fact, I thought that this had been discussed
> some time back and it may even be already happening in 3.3) but it
> doesn't help for existing versions, where the py.exe launcher does. So
> as a longer-term solution, supplying pythonXY.exe binaries may be
> useful (depending on how PEP 397 progresses), but the benefits won't
> be for quite some time. (And there's still the question of what gets
> put on PATH by default even if version-specific binaries exist).

Suppose for Windows there were one '.../python' directory wherever the 
user first asks it to be put and that all pythons, not just cpython, are 
installed in directories below that and that the small startup file is 
copied into or linked from the python directory. Then the one python 
directory could be put on the path and left there and never removed by 
any python de-installer (unless perhaps it check that there are no 
subdirs and *asks* the user.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy