[Distutils] Disposition of C extensions and packages

[Guido van Rossum]

> Guido van Rossum writes:
>  > I think it's worth looking again into the issue of where
>  > package-specific shared libs should come from when the package itself
>  > is loaded from an archive.

[Fred Drake]
>   As well as in the existing case of packages with both Python and C
> components.  It simply doesn't make sense for a package containing
> primarily cross-platform files to be installed in platform-specific
> locations simply because the infrastructure doesn't understand the
> split.
>   This is *not* an issue of disk space; I expect packages will appear
> which include data as well as code; these packages should be able to
> locate their associate data files using __path__ (or something
> similar).  This makes a lot of sense for packages that perform
> character-set recoding and the like, where a large number of
> translation files may be carried along as part of the package.

I claim that it *is* an issue of disk space.  Having the installation
of a particular package spread out over two places is inconvenient
from a management point of view, and sharing one of those places
between different installations (for different platforms) of the same
package just makes it a lot worse.

Note that your example hinges on "a large number of translation
files".  That reeks of a disk space argument!  (If you were thinking
of network bandwidth or download time, there are other solutions that
don't affect the install locations.)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)