[Python-Dev] Compile-time resolution of packages [Was: Another update for PEP 394...]

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 2:07 PM Neil Schemenauer <nas-python at arctrix.com>
wrote:

> On 2019-02-26, Gregory P. Smith wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 9:55 AM Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> > For an OS distro provided interpreter, being able to restrict its use to
> > only OS distro provided software would be ideal (so ideal that people who
> > haven't learned the hard distro maintenance lessons may hate me for it).
>
> This idea has some definite problems.  I think enforcing it via convention
is about as much as would be good to do.  Anything more and you make it
hard for people who really need to use the vendor provided interpreter from
being able to do so.

Why might someone need to use the distro provided interpreter?

* Vendor provides some python modules in their system packages which are
not installable from pip (possibly even a proprietary extension module, so
not even buildable from source or copyable from the system location) which
the end user needs to use to do something to their system.
* End user writes a python module which is a plugin to a system tool which
has to be installed into the system python to from which that system tool
runs.  The user then wants to write a script which uses the system tool
with the plugin in order to do something to their system outside of the
system tool (perhaps the system tool is GUI-driven and the user wants to
automate a part of it via the python module).  They need their script to
use the system python so that they are using the same code as the system
tool itself would use.

There's probably other scenarios where the benefits of locking the user out
of the system python outweigh the benefits but these are the ones that I've
run across lately.

-Toshio
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