Why Python Isn’t Relocatable -- and How to Fix It

Key Takeaways

when you build Python, not on Windows, but like on Linux and on Mac OS, a bunch of absolute paths get encoded. So, it's kind of hard in general to like build Python on one machine and then take that Python and like send it to a different machine and run it. Those absolute paths might be different. So, in general, Python is not relocatable, right? This causes some problems because it means that if you want to install Python, like with Pym for example, Pym will have to build Python from source. So it downloads the source code and it runs the whole build process. Now this isn't true for everything. Like if you install Python through like a Linux distro manager like apppt install Python or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. That typically doesn't have to build. And that's because in a Linux distribution they can make a bunch of assumptions about where things are. So the absolute paths tend to be right. Greg Sorc created this project called Python build standalone that basically patches Python to make it relocatable. Those are the Pythons that we use. So they take Python 3.13, Python 3.12 and they apply a couple patches during the build process to make them relocatable. So we took over as maintainers of that project. It does come with some quirks. I think we've like significantly reduced the number of deviations over the past few months. Some of that is about we're working with CPython to actually like change things in CPython and some of that is about fixing things in Python build standalone and just making investments there. We do a lot of optimizations during the build to make the Python faster that Pym typically skips because it's kind of slow to like run that build process. But because we're just like building it once and then everyone gets it, everyone kind of benefits from that work. But if you do run into quirks, you should file issues so that we can fix them. That is my only request.