First of all, an apology. I know this is probably going to be of limited interest for many on python-dev, but I'm honestly not sure where there's a better audience for the question. As it's related to how people should use the new "embeddable" distribution of Python 3.5, I'm hoping it's sufficiently relevant - but if not, feel free to direct me to a better forum.
I've been trying to use the new embeddable distribution to build a Windows installation of vim that includes a Python interpreter, rather than relying on the user having a system install of Python on PATH. This strikes me as precisely the sort of usage that the embeddable distribution would be great for. And indeed, it works fine for that. But when it comes to distribution, I have an issue. The problem is that for vim to find the Python DLL, it needs to be alongside vim.exe (there's a small complication here I'll come to later, but let's ignore that for now). So I unzip the embeddable distribution into the directory containing vim.exe. However, I want that directory on PATH (so I can run vim from the command line). Now, as the embeddable distribution includes python.exe, this pollutes my PATH with an extra copy of python, which may or may not be picked up in preference to my "real" python, depending on how I install python. That's bad - I can delete python.exe and pythonw.exe from my vim installation, but I still have a load of Python DLLs on PATH that could potentially mess up other Python installations on my machine (I honestly don't know how likely that is, particularly if I distribute my vim build to other users with different setups). What I'd like to do is to put the Python stuff in a subdirectory of the Vim installation, so it's safely isolated. In the case of vim, I can do this, as vim has an option to dynamically load the Python DLL via LoadLibrary, and I can patch vim to look in <vim dir>\python before searching PATH. But the LoadLibrary stuff is horribly fragile, and I doubt anyone else embedding Pthon in their application is likely to do that - they will probably just link to python35.dll at load-time. I'm not aware of any way to adjust the loader's search path for DLLs to include a subdirectory that's not on PATH, so it seems to me that there's no good way to avoid having the embeddable distribution visible via the user's PATH. For vim, I'll probably go for the dynamic loading approach with a patch to look in a subdirectory. But have I missed any other approaches that make an embedded Python more isolated from the user's system? Paul _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
