[Python-ideas] size of the installation of Python on mobile devices

[Nick Coghlan]

On 1 August 2016 at 15:46, Stephen J. Turnbull
<turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
> Victor Stinner writes:
>
>  > Xavier is a core developer.  He is free to dedicate his time to
>  > supporting sourceless distribution :-)
>
> So are we all, core or not.  But on Nick's terms (he even envisions
> releases with the "sourceless" build broken), I don't think adding to
> core is fair to Xavier's (and others') efforts in this direction.

How would it be any different from our efforts to support other
platforms outside the primary set of Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and
*BSD?

Things *definitely* break from time-to-time on those other less common
setups, and when they do, folks submit patches to fix them after they
notice (usually because they went to rebase their own work on a newer
version and discovered things didn't work as expected). I'd see this
working the same way - we wouldn't go out of our way to break
sourceless builds, but if they did break, it would be on the folks
that care about them to submit patches to resolve the problem.

The gain for folks that care would be getting a green light to pursue
more robust support for that model in the standard library itself,
such as clearly marking test cases that require linecache to be
working (as we already do for tests that require docstrings or that
test CPython implementation details rather than Python language
features), and perhaps even eventually developing a mechanism along
the lines of JavaScript sourcemaps that would allow linecache to keep
working, even when running on a sourceless build of the standard
library.

> It would also set an unfortunate precedent.

What precedent do you mean? That ./configure may contain options that
aren't 100% reliable? That's already the case - I can assure you that
we *do not* consistently test all of the options reported by
"./configure --help", since what matters is that the options people
are *actually using* keep working in the context where they're using
them, rather than all of the options working in every possible
environment.

Or do you mean the precedent that we're OK with folks shipping the
standard library sans source code? *That* precedent was set when Guido
chose to use of permissive licensing model for the language definition
and runtime - while shipping without source code is a bad idea in
educational contexts, and other situations where having the code on
hand for inspection by end users is beneficial, Python is used in
plenty of scenarios where those considerations don't apply.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia