One thing I always liked about Perl was the way you can create a single installation directory which can be shared between archictures. Say what you will about the language: the Porters have an enormous amount of experience and expertise producing portable and flexible interpreter installations.
By this I mean, basically, multiple architectures (Linux, Solaris, MacOSX, even Windows) sharing the same $prefix/lib/python2.7 directory. The large majority of the contents there are completely portable across architectures (aren't they?) so why should I have to duplicate many megabytes worth of files? The only parts of the install which are not shareable (as far as I can tell) are the .so dynamic objects (and the python executable itself obviously). If the default sys.path included platform-specific directories as well as the generic lib-dynload, it would be possible. I do see that there are "plat-*" directories available in the default path. Is it possible to make use of these (say, by renaming each architecture's lib-dynload to the appropriate plat-* name)? If that works, the remaining issue is the site-packages directory. There is no ability (that I can see) to separate out the shareable vs. non-sharable aspects of the add-on site-packages. Any comments or suggestions? Am I overestimating the amount of sharing that's possible? Thanks! -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
