Is it possible to install Python on a network?

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 12:35 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> roys2005 <roys2005 at gmail.com> writes:
>
>>   I am trying to find out how I can install Python on a central machine
>>   so that all users can use it
>
> That's what confuses me. How do you envisage this working? On a given
> machine, you can *run* programs only on that machine.
>
> If you want to run a program on a different machine, you must somehow
> invoke it using a network service already configured to do that. What
> service are you expecting to use? SSH? HTTP? There is nothing about a
> programming language interpreter which pents a way to run programs
> across a network, unless you can specify *how* that is to happen.
>
> What do you imaging a user doing, exactly, on machine ‘foo’ to make a
> program execute on machine ‘bar’? At what step – exactly how – does the
> communication between the machines occur to invoke the program? How is
> the user's input, and the program's output, communicated in a way that
> machine ‘foo’ knows to interact with machine ‘bar’?

Network mounts work fine for this kind of thing. I don't usually do it
with binaries, due to architecture and library incompatibilities, but
I have a directory that I mount on half a dozen systems, and part of
what it carries is a Python script. So in that sense, I do run that
program from one central machine, on all those other machines. I use
sshfs for the mounting, but other systems work too.

Of course, it is a dependency. In my case it's safe, because the
purpose of that Python script is bound up with the rest of what's
available (and which must be centralized; it's about a terabyte of
stuff, and I don't want to be constantly syncing it). It all depends
on how dangerous that is to you.

ChrisA