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No way to disable bytecode compilation when installing cpython #160835
Description
Bug report
When building and installing cpython it can be preferable to have more control over when compileall is executed. It would be useful if there was a way to disable the compilation in the libinstall target for people who want to control the compilation without doing it twice.
(Happy to send a patch if this isn't rejected out of hand)
CPython versions tested on:
3.14
Operating systems tested on:
Linux
Activity
picnixz commentedon Oct 28, 2026
What is the use case explicitly? is it a theoretical feature or is there a real need from redistributors?
rossburton commentedon Oct 28, 2026
The specific use case is that we're packaging the standard library in more than one package so the easy way to handle this is to split the packaging up and then compile the py, because then the pyc goes into the right package without needing more work.
picnixz commentedon Oct 30, 2026
I have no strong opinion here but not compiling bytecode may be relevant. cc @encukou
encukou commentedon Oct 30, 2026
Maybe we can turn this into a
compileall.pyimprovement?IMO, the invocation should be
make install COMPILEALL_OPTS='--no-recursion --skip=.*', which would be possible with two patches:-xoptions, so Makefile's-x badsyntaxdoesn't overwriteCOMPILEALL_OPTS--skipfor-x,--[no-]recursionto-l; perhaps more.rossburton commentedon Oct 30, 2026
I have a patch to add long options for clarity.
The public API such as
compileall.compile_direxposes a singlerxregex, so this can't be just changed to a list.However, the argument parser could allow multiple skips and construct a new regex. So something like
python3 -mcompileall -x foo -x bar ...would result inrx = r"foo|bar". If this is acceptable I can post it.