On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 09:22:09PM -0400, Greg Ward wrote:
On 05 May 2000, Michael Muller said:
I totally agree with the site-home-currentdir structure, but shouldn't the site level file live someplace apart from the code? If you customize the site file, you probably don't want your changes clobbered by a subsequent distutils install. sys.prefix + '/etc', perhaps?
That's the nice thing about how sys.prefix "belongs" to Python on Windows and Mac OS. I'm not super-keen on /usr/local/etc; I'd rather keep the Distutils config file somewhere in the Python library tree. Thus, the distutils (or site-packages/distutils, for pre-1.6) directory makes sense. I'm open to other ideas.
Au contraire for Debian and the like. ;-) Think about installations where Distutils live in a read-only tree (e.g. mounted read-only per NFS), or a tree that's shared across many different systems and platforms. In Debian's case, the directive is to keep *all* system-wide configuration files in /etc. The /usr tree (less /usr/local) should potentially be mountable read-only. Variable data goes into /var. That's also the sketch of the Linux Filesystem Standard (now FHS). Btw, I think as a consequence even site.py should be moved from lib/python1.X to /etc. In the end, I guess this is a philosophical question, and the answer will be different depending on your viewpoint (standalone Windoid/Macoid machines or homo/heterogeneous networked systems potentially sharing a common filespace). Gregor