So you have an "embeddded" Django instance where you want to strip the thing down to the minimum required files.  You run compileall on your site-packages, then strip/delete all of the .py files... and your Django becomes pretty useless, because it no longer recognizes any of your management plugins (not even the built-in ones).

This little patch makes the management system accept any of py, pyc, so or pyd files as management plugins.

*** __init__.py-orig	2012-05-22 12:02:19.000000000 -0400
--- __init__.py	2012-07-05 18:04:23.000000000 -0400
***************
*** 15,21 ****
  # A cache of loaded commands, so that call_command
  # doesn't have to reload every time it's called.
  _commands = None
! 
  def find_commands(management_dir):
      """
      Given a path to a management directory, returns a list of all the command
--- 15,21 ----
  # A cache of loaded commands, so that call_command
  # doesn't have to reload every time it's called.
  _commands = None
! module_suffixes = ['.py','.pyc','.so','.pyd']
  def find_commands(management_dir):
      """
      Given a path to a management directory, returns a list of all the command
***************
*** 25,32 ****
      """
      command_dir = os.path.join(management_dir, 'commands')
      try:
!         return [f[:-3] for f in os.listdir(command_dir)
!                 if not f.startswith('_') and f.endswith('.py')]
      except OSError:
          return []
  
--- 25,36 ----
      """
      command_dir = os.path.join(management_dir, 'commands')
      try:
!         return [
!             file for (file,ext) in [
!                 os.path.splitext( fullname )
!                 for fullname in os.listdir(command_dir)
!             ] if ext in module_suffixes
!         ]
      except OSError:
          return []
  

Patching django/core/management/__init__.py (Django 1.4).