On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:17 AM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
The other thing is that using *only* relative paths doesn't cut it - there are circumstances where you write files outside site-packages, so you would need absolute paths for those files (or incredibly convoluted relative ones),
Actually, we already have a mechanism for that - IIRC, PEP 376 defines various system-managed file categories. So if you specify e.g. that something is a Powershell script, then the installation database should record a path relative to the "powershell root", which is defined elsewhere.
and that wouldn't work well in the OSAF scenario you described, anyway.
Actually, it'd work fine in the case where script paths are relative to "the directory where scripts go", when that directory is determined by the Python instance doing the looking/installing/repairing. Anyway, the point was that there's more than one reason to want relative paths, and as long as they can be relative to things besides the location of the library itself, the other cases can be taken care of. (The OSAF example is also a reason to want the paths to always be /-separated, even on Windows.)