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

Steve Holden steve at holdenweb.com
Fri May 2 10:49:17 CEST 2008

Guido van Rossum wrote:

I stand corrected on a few points. You've convinced me that ~/lib/ is wrong. But I still don't like ~/.local/; not in the last place because it's not any more local than any other dot files or directories. The "symmetry" with /usr/local/ is pretty weak, and certainly won't help beginning users. So it's the name you don't like rather than the invisibility?

As a compromise, I'm okay with ~/Python/. I would like to be able to say that the user explicitly has to set an environment variable in order to benefit from this feature, just like with $PYTHONPATH and $PYTHONSTARTUP. But that might defeat the point of making this easy to use for noobs. Groan. Then everyone else realizes what a "great idea" this is, and we see ~/Perl/, ~/Ruby/, ~/C# (that'll screw the Microsoft users, a directory with a comment market in its name), ~/Lisp/ and the rest? I don't think people would thank us for that in the long term.

I'm about +10 on invisibility, for the simple reason that "hiding the mechanism" is the right thing to do for naive users, who are the most likely to screw things up if given the chance and the most likely to be unaware of dot-name directories. If you don't like ~/.local/ then please consider ~/.private/ or ~/.personal/ or something else, but don't gratuitously add a visible subdirectory.

On OS X I think we should put this somewhere under ~/Library/. Just put it in a different place than where the Python framework puts its stuff. Nothing to say about OS X.

One day Windows might start to respect the "hidden dot" convention, but perhaps in the interim we could create a (Windows-hidden) ~/.private/? Assuming we could work out where to put it ;-)

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 8:25 PM, <glyph at divmod.com> wrote: [much good sense]

regards Steve

Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/

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