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

glyph at divmod.com glyph at divmod.com
Thu Jan 17 14:27:23 CET 2008

On 12:19 pm, eric+python-dev at trueblade.com wrote:

glyph at divmod.com wrote:

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.

I would like to agree. MacOS has an advantage here though. Windows, even without cygwin, but doubly so once cygwin gets involved, has a schizophrenic idea of what "~" means. (I believe other messages in this thread have made reference to issues with expanduser.) You definitely are going to have a hard time getting non-cygwin and cygwin python to agree on the location of your home directory. I rather brutally modified my last Windows installation to get those two values to line up, and it required surgery for each user created, and caused a number of "interesting issues" with various tools writing fake cygwin UNIX paths and others thinking they were Windows drive-letter paths...

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.

If you can figure out how to make this work without raising any of the bogeymen I just made reference to, I would be strongly in favor.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list