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

Richard Boulton richard at lemurconsulting.com
Fri May 2 14:49:42 CEST 2008

Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:

-On [20080502 10:50], Steve Holden (steve at holdenweb.com) wrote:

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 +1 on just using HOME/.local,butotherwiseHOME/.local, but otherwise HOME/.local,butotherwiseHOME/.python makes sense too. $HOME/.python.d doesn't do it for me, too clunky (and hardly used if I look at my .files in $HOME).

I'd vote for $HOME/.local if asked. I agree with most, if not all, of the arguments posted in favour of this, but would also like to point out the XDG-basedir specification: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html

This specification concerns where to put data files rather than libraries, but the relevance here is that the default location to put user-specific files according to it is in $HOME/.local/share

Whilst by no means universally followed, uptake amongst Gnome and GTK applications seems to be rising - I certainly have a load of stuff in .local/share/ without ever having configured anything away from the Ubuntu install defaults. So, on Ubuntu computers at least, it seems likely that a $HOME/.local/ directory will already exist, with the beginnings of a unix style layout inside it.

-- Richard

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