[Python-Dev] Windows installers and %PATH% (original) (raw)

Brian Curtin brian.curtin at gmail.com
Fri Aug 26 15:40:38 CEST 2011

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 23:04, Andrew Pennebaker < andrew.pennebaker at gmail.com> wrote:

Please have the Windows installers add the Python installation directory to the PATH environment variable.

The http://bugs.python.org bug tracker is a better place for feature requests like this, of which there have been several over the years. This has become a hotter topic lately with several discussions around the community, and a PEP to provide some similar functionality. I've talked with several educators/trainers around and the lack of a Path installation is the #1 thing that bites their newcomers, and it's an issue that bites them before they've even begun to learn.

Many newbies dive in without knowing that they must manually add C:\PythonXY

to PATH. It's yak shaving, something perfectly automatable that should have been done by the installers way back in Python 1.0.

Please also add PYTHONROOT\Scripts. It's where cool things like easyinstall.exe are stored. More yak shaving.

A clean installation of Python includes no Scripts directory, so I'm not sure we should be polluting the Path with yet-to-exist directories. An approach could be to have packaging optionally add the scripts directory on the installation of a third-party package.

The only potential downside to this is upsetting users who manage multiple

python installations. It's not a problem: they already manually adjust PATH to their liking.

"Users who manage multiple python installations" is probably a very, very large number, so we have quite the audience to appease, and it actually is a problem. We should not go halfway on this feature and say "if it doesn't work perfectly, you're back to being on your own". I think the likely case is that any path addition feature will read the path, then offer to replace existing instances or append to the end.

I haven't yet done any work on this, but my todo list for 3.3 includes adding some path related features to the installer. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20110826/c5c79a50/attachment.html>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list