With the introduction of zipimport I experimented to
determine how much of the standard library could be
provided in zip format.

I discovered that I could entirely remove the standard
library, replacing it with /lib/python24.zip, with the
following caveats (this is under Cygwin, where /usr/lib
appears to be a loopback mount of /lib: paths will
differ on other platforms):

1. The /lib/python2.4/lib-dynload directory had to be
copied to the /lib directory to make zlib available to
zipimport;

2. The interpreter now produced three error messages:
"Could not find platform independent libraries <prefix>"
"Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix>"
"Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]"

With the move towards esoteric import mechanisms it
seems that the searches for os.py in the filesystem
might no longer be an appropriate way to start
executing the interpreter.

Should some import hook API be available to determine
whether standard libraries are available without
actually importing anything?