[Python-Dev] Python install layout and the PATH on win32 (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Mar 16 09:38:18 CET 2012

On 16 March 2012 00:12, Carl Meyer <carl at oddbird.net> wrote:

Changing the directory name is in fact a new and different (and much more invasive) special case, because distutils et al install scripts there, and that directory name is part of the distutils install scheme. Installers don't care where the Python binary is located, so moving it in with the other scripts has very little impact.

Two thoughts:

  1. The incompatibilities between platforms is precisely the problem that sysconfig is designed to solve, isn't it? So tools in Python will either use sysconfig (and be correct regardless of layout) or should be encouraged to change to use sysconfig (so they are layout-independent). And tools not in Python will be platform-specific anyway (I assume no-one is writing Perl scripts to manipulate their Python installation :-))

  2. The differences in layout between a installed Python, uninstalled builds and virtualenvs, on the same platform, are more annoying in practice than any cross-platform differences (at least for me). But again, these are known issues that can be dealt with easily enough (trivially via sysconfig from within Python).

If I were "tidying up", I would consider renaming Scripts to "bin" on Windows, and putting the Python executables in there (so there's only one directory to add to PATH, and it uses the common name "bin" rather than a name that implies that it doesn't contain exes). But that offers no practical benefit, and as Mark says does break existing code, so I don't think it's worth it.

If you can get Guido to lend you the time machine keys, I'd support putting it in from Python 1.5 onwards :-)

Paul.

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