[Pythonmac-SIG] Some thoughts on Python and OS X

[Skip Montanaro]

    >> And why, for that matter, are all of these modules always ending up
    >> in a '2.3' directory? I happen to know that some of them aren't
    >> dependent on the Python binary, and it looks to me as if, when 2.3
    >> changes to 2.4, I'm gonna have some unnecessary work, again. Trust
    >> me, if a module is incompatible with 2.4, I'll know it soon enough;
    >> you don't have to force me to move everything manually to the 2.4
    >> path.

    Bob> This happens on EVERY Python platform.  If you want to install
    Bob> "version independent" Python files somewhere else, feel free to do
    Bob> so.  There are many options that you may pass to distutils to
    Bob> control this behavior.  Then you simply need to make a pth file
    Bob> that points to your "version independent" site directory.

Note that in the current scheme of things there's no reasonable way to
separate .py[co] files from their .py ancestors.  So even if you have an
entirely platform-independent module written in Python the generated
bytecode may differ from version-to-version.  The current scheme allows you
to have multiple versions of Python installed which can coexist peacefully.

Skip