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

Eric Smith eric+python-dev at trueblade.com
Thu Jan 17 13:19:57 CET 2008

glyph at divmod.com wrote:

One of the problems we've encountered over and over again with Combinator is that MacOS has a dual personality. Its personality is not just an issue of framework vs. non-framework build, but a fundamental question of "is this platform a UNIX or is it not a UNIX".

MacOS isn't the only platform that has this problem. I use cygwin under Windows, and I wish Python (whether or not a cygwin build) would also use ~/.local.

On the Mac, our user now has a problem: given that ~/Library/Python/ doesn't follow the /usr or /usr/local style filesystem layout, autotools-based projects will not build their libraries in the right places using a single command-line option. (I guess maybe you could do something with --bindir and --sbindir and --exec-prefix or whatever, I don't know. I tend to get bored and wander off when I have to pass more than 3 options to a configure script.)

I guess Windows isn't as bad as MacOS in this case, because there's no standard to follow and conflict with. Everything under whatever directory we choose won't likely match other packages, so we can do whatever we want. Still, I'd prefer something under $HOME.

Windows has this problem less because everything has to be done so completely differently.

True, except that cygwin tries hard to make it look like Unix. I'd rather Python under Windows really look like Unix, but I'm probably in a minority. And yes, I do share computers (physically and through Terminal Server), so per-user local libraries would be nice.

Eric.

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