Where I currently work we've had a small debate about deploying our Python code to the production servers. I voted to build binary dependencies (like the python mysql drivers) on the server itself, just using pip install -r requirements.txt
. This was quickly vetoed with no better explanation that "we don't put compilers on the live servers". As a result our deployment process is becoming convoluted and over-engineered simply to avoid this compilation step.
My question is this: What's the reason these days to avoid having a compiler on live servers?