[Python-Dev] Fixing #7175: a standard location for Python config files (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Thu Aug 12 13:17:49 CEST 2010

On 12/08/2010 11:54, Tim Golden wrote:

On 12/08/2010 11:40, Michael Foord wrote:

User editable configuration files are very different from libraries. The per user site-packages folder should be hidden somewhere out of the way where you can get at them if you want them but won't stumble across them all the time. e.g. AppData on Windows.

For files we expect the user to be able to edit we shouldn't go out of our way to make them hard or inconvenient to find. This really comes down -- as with the Mac discussion last week, I think -- to the tension between standard file locations and easy-to-get-to. The difference on Windows, though, is that while on Mac it's either: Apple standard /This/That/TheOther vs Unix standard $HOME/.something on Windows it's %APPDATA%\myprog vs whatever-I-thought-of-at-the-time. APPDATA isn't actually that hard to get to on any version of Windows post 2000. (Just stick %APPDATA% into any Explorer window -- even IE, for goodness sake). Even from the command line it's not hard: notepad "%APPDATA%\python\python26\idle.ini" Ultimately, as a Windows user/developer, I'd vote for a memorable consistency, which for me would be %APPDATA%\python... If everything's in one place, I'll just create a shortcut / hardlink / whatever to get me there when I want to change things.

How is ~/python not memorable or consistent? (And cross-platform memorability and consistency is valuable too.)

Another issue is discoverability. Many users won't know about these config files unless they see them. Sure if you know where they are then editing them is easy - but how often as a user do you browse your AppData folder? (As a windows user the only times I went delving in this mysterious location was trying to diagnose obscure errors.)

I'm not aware of any consistent pattern of putting user editable files in AppData, and I doubt this is where most users would look for them. In fact for Windows the correct thing to do is probably to use the registry and then provide a graphical tool for editing the values. If you're arguing for consistency why not argue for this? If we were to provide native GUI tools for editing values then the location suggested by Ronald for the Mac (which is the standard location for preferences files maintained by GUI tools) would also be the right location.

All the best,

Michael

TJG

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