[Python-Dev] Playing with a new theme for the docs (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Mar 27 05:23:32 CEST 2012

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:35 AM, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:

On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 2:56 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

But since he's arguing the other end in the directory layout thread (where he says there are many special ways to invoke Python so that having different layouts on different platforms is easy to work around), I can't give much weight to his preference here. You're misconstruing my argument there: I said, rather, that the One Obvious Way to deploy a Python application is to dump everything in one directory, as that is the one way that Python has supported for at least 15 years now.

It's not at all obvious on any of the open source platforms (Cygwin, Debian, Gentoo, and MacPorts) that I use. In all cases, both several python binaries and installed libraries end up in standard places in the distro-maintained hierarchies, and it is not hard to confuse the distro-installed Pythons.

Being confident that one knows enough to set up a single directory correctly in the face of some of the unlovely things that packages may do requires more knowledge of how Python's import etc works than I can boast: virtualenv is a godsend. By analogy, yes, I think it makes sense to ask you to learn a bit about CSS and add a single line like "body { width: 65em; }" to your local config. That's one reason why CSS is designed to cascade.

Of course, even better yet would be if the browsers wrote the CSS for you (which probably wouldn't be too hard, if I knew any XUL, which I don't).

The comparison to CSS is also lost on me here; creating user-specific CSS is more aptly comparable telling people to write their own virtualenv implementations from scratch, and resizing the browser window is more akin to telling people to create a virtualenv every time they run the application, rather than just once when installing it.

Huh, if you say so -- I didn't realize that virtualenv did so little that it could be written in one line. All I know (and care) is that it promises to do all that stuff for me, and without affecting the general public (ie, the distro-provided Python apps).

And that's why I think the width of pages containing flowed text should be left up to the user to configure.

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