[Distutils] Odd limitation in packaging/distutils2

[Paul Moore]

On 4 November 2011 12:11, Mark Hammond <skippy.hammond at gmail.com> wrote:
> There really isn't anything that makes it "installed".  A built Python works
> completely fine just where it is (and indeed, will work just fine if moved
> somewhere else).  The closest thing to being "installed" on windows is an
> "InstalledPath" (or something :) registry key for the version, but that is
> only necessary in a limited number of contexts - when some executable other
> than the in-place python[w].exe needs to know where things are.

So that would imply that sysconfig.is_python_build is basically
meaningless on Windows. So at a minimum, it should always return False
on Windows.

Actually, it's not part of the public API of sysconfig (it's not in
__all__) and it's only used in one place within sysconfig.py, so maybe
it should be removed and the check done inline in that one place...

Paul.