[Python-Dev] PEP 370 - per-user scripts directory on Windows (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Feb 13 12:19:54 CET 2015

On 13 February 2015 at 10:15, Glenn Linderman <v+python at g.nevcal.com> wrote:

Maybe restricting it to running ".py" files or ".exe" files would be reasonable. That covers entry points (which should be the norm for newer projects) and Python scripts (which are the most likely things to be portable).

The WINDOWS py launcher hardly needs to be portable. Batch/CMD files also seem useful on WINDOWS. And Powershell? If a launcher is developed for or enhanced for other systems, shell scripts may be useful, and Batch/CMD not.

By "portable" in this sense I meant "not written by a Unix developer who hadn't thought about Windows much". I was comparing Python files with a .py extension and extensionless Python files, specifically (my wording didn't make that clear, sorry). Yes, files with extensions of .bat or .cmd or .ps1 are probably written for Windows only. But I think it's getting out of scope of the launcher to decide to use cmd.exe to launch .bat and .cmd files, and powershell to launch .ps1 files.

Regardless, my real point was that there can be all sorts of stuff in the Scripts directory, and I'm not convinced that this is a direction the launcher should be going in. Someone could make a case for launching certain types of file that might be in there, but I'm not going to be that person.

One thought - it's not hard using pkg_resources to enumerate all available console_script entry points, pick one and run it. So you could pretty simply write a script (that itself could be run with the launcher) to run anything in Scripts that's built via entry points (which is the recommended way these days).

launch.py

import sys import pkg_resources

Get the script name

script = sys.argv[1]

Remove our name from sys.argv

del sys.argv[0]

There's probably a better API you can use

for ep in pkg_resources.working_set.iter_entry_points('console_scripts'): if ep.name == script: fn = ep.load() sys.exit(fn())

Couldn't find the entry point

print("No entry point called {} available".format(script), file=sys.stderr) sys.exit(1)

Now you can do "py launch.py pip --help" and it will run pip for you.

If a project isn't exposing its scripts as entry points, ask them to :-)

Paul

Paul

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