I believe the python-ideas thread on this topic came to the conclusion that a -X flag -- e.g., `-X DisableOptimizations` -- would be a good way to turn off all optimizations. The flag could then either blindly set sys.dont_write_bytecode to True or set sys.flags.optimize to -1 in which case a bytecode file named e.g. foo.cpython-36.opt--1.pyc would be written which won't lead to any conflicts (I wish we could use False for sys.flags.optimize but that has the same values as 0 which is the default optimization level).
Does one of those proposal seems acceptable to everyone? Do people like Ned who asked for this feature have a preference as to whether the bytecode is or is not written out to a .pyc file?