[Python-Dev] sys.path[0] (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Tue, 07 Jan 2003 20:24:29 -0500

[Guido]

... Why would a GUI change the current directory? That seems pretty broken.

Sure is. Sean True and Mark Hammond and I all stumbled over this in the spambayes project while working on the Outlook client. Turned out that, on Win9x but not 2K (or perhaps it had to do with which version and service pack level of Outlook too ...), calling some subset of MS MAPI functions had the side effect of changing the current directory to a system directory in which some of MS's MAPI code lives. That really screwed up subsequent imports. I don't claim it's Python's job to try to hide that, though.