[Python-Dev] Deprecate PEP 370 Per user site-packages directory? (original) (raw)

Christian Heimes christian at python.org
Sat Jan 13 15:00:07 EST 2018

On 2018-01-13 20:08, Oleg Broytman wrote:

Hi!

On Sat, Jan 13, 2018 at 06:06:16PM +0100, Christian Heimes <christian at python.org> wrote: Hi,

PEP 370 [1] was my first PEP that got accepted. I created it exactly one decade and two days ago for Python 2.6 and 3.0. Back then we didn't have virtual environment support in Python. Ian Bicking had just started to create the virtualenv project a couple of months earlier. Fast forward 10 years... Nowadays Python has venv in the standard library. The user-specific site-packages directory is no longer that useful. Can I disagree? I would even say it's causing more trouble than it's worth. For example it's common for system script to use "#!/usr/bin/python3" shebang without -s or -I option. System scripts are run under user root which seldom has user-specific site-packages so why worry?

You'd be surprised how many tools and programs are using Python these days. You can easily break important user programs by installing a package with --user.

Christian

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