[Python-Dev] Python install layout and the PATH on win32 (Rationale part 1: Regularizing the layout) (original) (raw)

Brian Curtin brian at python.org
Fri Mar 23 03:26:36 CET 2012

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 13:57, VanL <van.lindberg at gmail.com> wrote:

Honestly, I didn't expect that much resistance. None of the people I talked to in person even cared, or if they did, they thought that consistency was a benefit. But now that virtualenvs are going in in 3.3, I see this as the last good chance to change this.

I was one of these people, first finding out just about the Scripts/bin change, and my thought was JFDI. The rest of it seems fine to me - I say let's go for it.

Personally, my main concerns are around procedure and policy. The more the discussion goes on, the more I feel that there should be a PEP to capture the details of the debate clearly. Too much is getting lost in the noise. And I think you should provide a clear statement of why this issue is important enough to justify violating the backward compatibility policies. As Mark said (I think it was Mark...) if this had been proposed for 3.0, it would have been fine. Now we're at 3.2 with 3.3 close to release, and it just seems too late to be worth the risk. One plus point about your posting this separately. It's made me think through the issue in a bit more detail, and I'm now a solid -1 on the proposal.

I have been trying at various PyCons and in various conversations to move this for years. No one cares. The current urgency is driven by pyvenv - changes now will be much, much easier than changes later. Again, I am happy to write a PEP. If I were to summarize (on this issue only): 1. The current backwards compatibility hit is minimal; I would be happy to contact and provide patches to the four packages I have found (and anyone else who wants one). Backwards compatibility in the future will probably be harder to deal with. 2. There are advantages to cross-platform consistency and to virtualenv-based development. I believe that these will grow in the future. 3. Most people won't care. To the extent that people notice, I think they will appreciate the consistency.

The virtualenv point, to me, is a strong one. I think we have an opportunity right now to make an adjustment, otherwise we're locked in again.

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