On Fri, Aug 25, 2017, at 10:02 PM, xoviat wrote:

I'm more or less persuaded by Nathaniel's argument that the source directory shouldn't be on sys.path, because:

- Most projects won't need it to be

- There are plausible ways it could go wrong

- I think we could make a backend which loads the real hooks from the source dir, so there's a backdoor for projects that do want it.

IIRC, however, Nick was still strongly in favour of including the source directory on sys.path, and he can usually persuade me of his position with a few emails. I do think that behaviour is more like the 'obvious thing' that Python programmers would expect.

Leo:

>  - removing srcdir from sys.path requires explicitly removing "" from the head of sys.path, which is not normally done.

Not necessarily. If the hook process is launched with a script at the command line, it is the script directory, not the cwd, that is added to sys.path. My WIP hook-calling module works this way:

With this code, we would actually need to explicitly *add* the source directory (CWD) to sys.path before importing the hook.

> - it would break many setuptools based projects, probably forcing the setuptools backend to reinsert it, defeating the purpose of removing it in the first place.

I don't think we should decide this based on what setuptools does; I expect it to need quite a bit of special handling in any case.

Thomas