On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 1:49 AM, Ronald Oussoren <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
..
> What Apple does and doesn't ship is not important for this discussion.
>
I agree.  I used Apple as an example because I happened to post from
an Apple laptop.  I am sure it is similarly hard to find demo programs
on every other OS and there is no consistency between different
distributions.

However they do ship Lib/test.  This tells me that they don't try to
prune Lib and I think most distributions similarly ship Lib as is.

> Our OSX installer does install most of these, on the assumption that anything that is part of the
> source distribution might be of interest for users.

Installing some of the tools (and I don't think any demos are
installed that way) next to python executable presents a namespace
problem.  Since tools are not consistently prefixed with 'py', they
may conflict with system or user tools that happen to be in the path.
Support for multiple python versions is also somewhat ad hoc.  For
example, on my system I have 2to3, 2to32.6 and 2to3-3.1.   I do agree
that   2to3-3.1 is an improvement over 2to32.6, but how can I guess
that idle2.6 gets upgraded to idle3.1  rather than idle-3.1?  With -m
approach, all I need to know is how to start python of the desired
version: python, python2.6, or even ./python.exe from the root of the
development tree.