[Python-Dev] Python and the Linux Standard Base (LSB)

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Nov 30, 2006, at 6:44 PM, Greg Ewing wrote:

> Barry Warsaw wrote:
>
>> When I switched to OS X for most of my desktops, I had several   
>> collisions in this namespace.
>
> I think on MacOSX you have to consider that it's really
> ~/Documents and the like that are *your* namespaces,
> rather than the top level of your home directory.

That's not how a *nix developer is going to think, but OSX does  
straddle the line between my grandma's OS and a Real Development  
Platform.  It usually does a pretty good job of letting the *nix  
geeks pop the hood and play in the sandbox they're used to (to mix  
some metaphors :), but letting you ignore all that stuff if you want,  
like when I'm just using it to write some music.

I actually think it does a pretty good job here too, or at least as  
good as can be expected.  But it does create collisions where I've  
generally not had them on e.g. Linux or Solaris.  Maybe I'd see more  
of that if e.g. I actually tried to use a Linux desktop in grandma- 
mode too.

> Also, I think MacOSX has a somewhat different philosophy
> about hiding things. The Finder hides the internals of
> things like application bundles, which is fine, but
> the application itself is visible, so you can move it
> around or delete it if you want.

The Finder is for my grandma, the terminal is for me.  Sometimes I / 
want/ to put on my grandma's clothes and pretend I'm just a desktop  
consumer.  When I do, I'm usually fine with letting Finder protect me  
from all the hungry-wolf dot-files.

> With ~/.local, you're hiding the fact that the applications
> or libraries or whatever are even there in the first
> place. You've got all this disk space being used up,
> but no way of seeing where or by what, and no
> obvious way of freeing it up. I think that's bad HCI.

Yes, but who are they hidden from?  Dot-files aren't for my grandma,  
they're for me (in my normal clothes).  I'd expect that a geek who  
installed stuff into ~/.local would know enough to know how to find  
it, delete it, etc.  To me that's good adaptive HCI -- novice users  
don't care and won't use it or see it, advanced users know how to  
take advantage of it because it fits in, or at least relates to,  
their world view.

OTOH, the fact that most OSX applications don't store their data in  
dot-files but instead in ~/Library is fine too, because their data  
needs to be visible to grandma occasionally.

- -Barry

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