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

Christian Heimes lists at cheimes.de
Thu Jan 17 21:53:31 CET 2008

glyph at divmod.com wrote:

My suggestion would be to have both ~/.local and ~/Library/Python be honored on the Mac, because there really isn't much harm in doing so. Perhaps it would make sense for non-framework builds to not honor ~/Library/Python, but I am pretty certain, based on experience fielding requests from confused users, that framework builds should still honor ~/.local/lib/python.../site-packages.

I'm taking your suggestion under consideration: ~/.local for standard and framework builds and ~/Library/Python for framework builds only.

In any event, the really important thing from my perspective is that the PEP should explain how this very common use-case for per-user installation of libraries can be accomplished on each of the "big three" platforms. This explanation should be put somewhere that users can easily find it when they are building libraries.

I don't know what the "right way" to do this on Windows is though, so I can't offer much help there. Something to do with MinGW and intense suffering, I would guess.

Good point, but is it the job of the PEP to explain such problems in detail? The PEP should consider the problem but the explanation belongs to a tutorial - IMHO.

* The patch also adds a usecustomize hook to site. Is it useful and should it stay? Should this be "usercustomize"? I thought it was a typo but I see the same typo in the PEP. I have often wished for something like this for debugging, and it might have other uses, but there should be a caution against abuse :).

Yeah! I've a tendency to drag typos through my code because I heavily use copy 'n paste. A while ago I copied a typo from C code into the Python unit tests and later into the docs, too

Christian

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