I really don’t like the proliferation of pycache folders through the extensions and addons folders because it makes a mess in a number of scenarios where the extensions/addons are being synchronized across multiple machines (e.g. from a network volume or via a network system like Google Drive).
This causes problems because the shared usage can cause sessions to fight over the same files and cause duplicates due to locking concerns.
Historically, I used PYTHONPYCACHEPREFIX to tell Python to put the cached files in a separate local-to-machine location, but that directive is now ignored by blender unless the user specifies to use the system environment (see #124953 - Blender is ignoring PYTHONPYCACHEPREFIX - blender - Blender Projects)
I’m just wondering whether it might be welcome/acceptable to come with a way to configure PYTHONCACHEPREFIX inside blender’s own Python environment, where the user could activate this and choose an appropriate cache location within blender’s preferences, in case they want to. This would avoid the user having to write shell scripts or similar to band-aid this (e.g. for pipeline cases that expect to launch ‘blender’ but don’t themselves offer a way to pass the argument to use the system Python environment).
I may also be overthinking this, hence the post to solicit opinions.