Add a command line parameter to add folders to sys.path (needed for Embedded Python)

[petersuter]

@pf_moore

use the embeddable distribution in situations where the nuget distribution might be better

It would be nice to get more documentation / explanations about when they should be used / in what way they differ / intention of the ._pth isolation mode / why some things are missing from them etc.

Maybe it already exists? 4. Using Python on Windows — Python 3.12.1 documentation says the nuget package is for CI only, while the embeddable package is for distribution with applications written in Python (4.4.1) or applications written in native code (4.4.2). I just noticed further down (4.9) contains some more information, although still a bit sparse.

@pf_moore

not needing the nuget tool

The nuget tool is not strictly needed apparently:

Embedding Python in a C++ self-contained executable

Grab the package from Nuget. There’s a direct download URL, which you can pretty easily calculate, and a .nupkg is just a ZIP file with more metadata. Alternatively, you could make your build calculate the embeddable distro URL from its own version and download that one. Unfortunately in both cases, you’ll need to know the micro version (unless you use nuget.exe to do the download) - you can’t just ask for “the latest 3.11” for example. I can think of a few ways to streamline our set of inst…

Identifying gaps in Python distribution

The code is available, and the protocol is no secret. It’s written in .NET though, which makes it not “proper” open source to some people, and I’m pretty sure all the maintainers are Microsoft employees, which makes it proprietary to many other people.[1] Yep. Just a zip file with metadata, signing, and a bit of internal structure. Not unlike a wheel… Not entirely unreasonably. “Open source” in that context is usually meant to imply “open governance”. ︎

import io
import urllib.request
import zipfile
zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(urllib.request.urlopen("https://www.nuget.org/api/v2/package/python/3.11.4").read())).extractall()

Is that “supported” / preferred?