[Python-Dev] PEP 370, open questions (original) (raw)

Christian Heimes lists at cheimes.de
Thu Jan 17 13:15:58 CET 2008

Tim Golden wrote:

Christian Heimes wrote:

I'll justify why I view Python as a roaming app. All company and university Linux boxes I've used in the past had exported $HOME via NFS. So ~/.local is roamed. I think there is a slight subtlety here: the exported NFS $HOME is more equivalent to the HOMEDRIVE/HOMEPATH which comes from the HOME directory in NT/AD. ie it is simply a share pointed to by a drive letter available wherever the user logs on. Roaming profiles actually copy the data from your network versions of USERPROFILE to the local machine [need to check they still do this; a while since I've administered this kind of setup]. The difference therefore is that installing large quantities of Python modules into a roaming profile path will involve their being copied to-and-fro on logon/logoff which, historically at least, was a known cause of slow startup/shutdown. I'll try to confirm if this is still the case.

I can't comment on the matter. I've not used roaming user profiles on Windows for more than five years. Can someone with more experience shed some like on the matter?

My own feeling was to use ~/.local on Windows as well (or whatever is agreed on for *nix) and let os.path.expanduser handle it. But... from r54364, USERPROFILE takes priority over HOMEDRIVE/HOMEPATH. Obviously Georg had some rationale there although a quick search of python-dev doesn't throw anything up. If we decide anything else here, though, we would seem to be somewhat in conflict with that interpretation of home/~ as USERPROFILE.

The PEP already explains why I don't want to write to ~/ on Windows. I had considered it shortly but MSDN advices against it.

Is %USERPROFILE% not equal to %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%? Maybe Gregor did a mistake because he thought that both point to the same location.

Christian

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