[Python-Dev] [Python-3000] Reminder: last alphas next Wednesday 07-May-2008 (original) (raw)

glyph at divmod.com glyph at divmod.com
Sun May 4 15:58:03 CEST 2008

On 3 May, 11:34 pm, fdrake at acm.org wrote:

On May 3, 2008, at 7:51 AM, skip at pobox.com wrote:

Fred asked for a --prefix flag (which is what I was voting on). I don't really care what you do by default as long as you give me a way to do it differently. What's most interesting (to me) is that no one's commented on my note that my preferred approach would be that there's no default at all; the location would have to be specified explicitly. Whether on the command line or in the distutils configuration doesn't matter, but explicitness should be required.

I thought I responded to it in my initial response, but let me be clearer.

First, Skip, I only care about the default behavior. There's already a way to do it differently: PYTHONPATH. So, Fred, I think what you're arguing for is to drop this feature entirely. Or is there some other use for a new way to allow users to explicitly add something to sys.path, aside from PYTHONPATH? It seems that it would add more complexity and I can't see what the value would be.

As I've said a dozen times in this thread already, the feature I'd like to get from a per-user installation location is that 'setup.py install', or at least some completely canonical distutils incantation, should work, by default, for non-root users; ideally non-administrators on windows as well as non-root users on unixish platforms.

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