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

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Aug 13 07:39:05 CEST 2010

Michael Foord writes:

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

But what does "~" mean on Windows? Inside of Python you can have a consistent definition, but that doesn't help people whose installer gets mixed signals so Python itself is in the wrong place, or who are using external tools (uninstaller, editor, application, etc) that work on or with Python.

I'm not arguing for use of AppData, but at least it's easy to explain, and easy to implement, for consistency.

Another issue is discoverability. Many users won't know about these config files unless they see them.

OK, maybe AppData's out.

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?

Sounds reasonable to me. Except Python's standard GUI is probably not up to Windows standards of beauty....

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