[Python-Dev] IDLE reading IDLESTARTUP or PYTHONSTARTUP on restart (original) (raw)

Mitchell L Model MLMLists at Comcast.net
Wed Feb 11 19:45:14 CET 2009

I have a patch for IDLE, but I've never submitted a patch before and not quite sure of the procedure, despite reading the guidelines at http://www.python.org/dev/patches/. But I'll be brave and persevere. The question I have at the moment is should I only submit the patch vs. 3.1 or also for 3.0? 2.7? 2.6? 2.5?

The main thing the patch does is: modify the subprocess restart procedure so that it reloads whatever file, if any, was loaded when IDLE first started and looked for IDLESTARTUP then PYTHONSTARTUP environment variables.

In addition: a -q option is added for starting IDLE on the command line to mean "quiet", as with Emacs, e.g., to suppress loading of IDLESTARTUP or PYTHONSTARTUP The former effect of -s would now be the default, which is desirable so double-clicking an IDLE icon to start it will cause the startup file to run. -s is changed to take an argument that is an alternate startup file to use

I am a bit concerned about changing -s to have a different meaning. Perhaps it's better to leave -s as an option that is simplhy superfluous and use a different letter for the alternate startup.

Guidance on all of these would be greatly appreciated. The patch itself disturbs things in a half-dozen places, but in very minimal ways, so it's not quite as easy as saying "add these three lines over here". (It was that simple until I started thinking about whether the restart should search for IDLESTARTUP/PYTHONSTARTUP again, and perhaps encounter a different file than IDLE did on startup [I think it shouldn't, but it's not a big deal either way] and if shouldn't, then whatever path was originally found has to be stored somewhere and used later. That led to the thinking behind the changes to the startup switches.

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