[Python-Dev] Re: .pth files in current or script directory (original) (raw)

Richard Cooper anon at spam-trap.richardcooper.net
Sun May 16 07:39:08 EDT 2004

Tim Delaney wrote:

A discussion (last week?) on c.l.py prompted a thought about .pth files. Feel free to shoot it down ;)

The discussion in question concerned someone using a version control system, and needing to change PYTHONPATH depending on which branch they were in.

That was me, I think.

My immediately two thoughts were:

1. Use a build system (e.g. make) to set PYTHONPATH appropriately. This is they type of thing we do.

I'm on windows and am quite attached to coding and running inside SciTE. I think I could knock up a script to do the right thing and configure SciTE to run it rather than python. However since I sometimes run from the command line and my colleagues use different editors that's a whole other can of worms.

2. Use a .pth file in the directory the code is run from (or possibly, the same directory as the script).

<sniped reason this doesn't work now>

Guido van Rossum wrote:

Can't they manipulate sys.path inside the code in question? That's invariably the solution I end up using -- I never play with PYTHONPATH any more.

I suppose I could, but adding a bit of boilerplate to the top of every source file to support something that should be completely orthogonal to the the language (using source control branches) seems a bit hacky- workaround-tastic even compared to my current solution (a post-it saying 'check PYTHONPATH' in big letters stuck to my monitor)

Anyway, enough discussion of my situation, which is probably more suited to python-list. My real question is:

Is there any desire to address this problem in some future python? When I see 2 python-dev'ers say "PYTHONPATH isn't up to it, here's what I do" I smell something that should be fixed once rather that worked around everywhere.

My initial idea was something along the lines of:

When a module is imported, its import search path includes everything it does now PLUS the directory that is the top of the module's enclosing package structure. That way you wouldn't have to add entries to PYTHONPATH just so that modules could import (absolutely) from their own package.

What do you think? Possible? Sensible? Any other ideas?

Rich

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