[Python-Dev] Inconsistent case in directory names for installed Python on Windows (original) (raw)

Brian Curtin brian.curtin at gmail.com
Wed May 18 14:47:27 CEST 2011

On May 18, 2011 7:03 AM, "anatoly techtonik" <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:

Greetings, While studying virtualenv code I've noticed that in Python directory tree include, libs and tcl are lowercased while other dirs are capitalized. It doesn't seem important (especially for developers here), but it still can leave an unpleasant image for people new to Python (and programming in general).

In theory there are probably a lot of things that might seem unpleasant but are actually non-issues. I don't believe there have been any complaints about actual unpleasantries with directory case.

├[Python27] │ ├─DLLs │ ├─Doc │ ├─include │ ├─Lib │ ├─libs │ ├─Scripts │ ├─tcl │ └─Tools How about making a consistent lowercased or uppercased scheme? Windows filesystems are case-insensitive, so the change shouldn't affect anybody.

Some Macs have case-sensitive file systems, and some people use case-sensitive file systems on various flavors of UNIX. The change would probably require a thorough look through the build chain.

Another candidate for normalization is Tools/Scripts dir, which I'd lowercase FWIW:

└─Tools ├─i18n ├─pynche ├─Scripts ├─versioncheck └─webchecker

Lowercased dirs on a top level seem to contains files that are relevant to C developers only. However, I can not say for sure. It seems that there could be a better place for them like top level directory named Dev or C-API. -- anatoly t.

Overall I think it boils down to a cosmetic change that I'm not sure we need to make, which could unnecessarily break people's work. -1 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20110518/31d855ad/attachment.html>

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