On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Ronald Oussoren
On 22 Oct, 2012, at 20:03, anatoly techtonik
wrote: What do you think about this?
The cost of changing the build directory is high, and has limited upsides at best. Some of the costs: confusing current users, breaking existing documentation like books, breaking build systems, incompatibility between python versions.
There is already a lot of incompatibilities between 2 and 3, and even between 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3, so the added value of this change to the total cost is miserable. Speaking about user confusion - if they won't find 'build' directory - they'll surely notice __build__ in their tree. Python 3 toolchains are still fragile, so it won't come for me a a surprise if Python 3.4 conventions are not the same as in 3.3. So, there are two questions: 1. If you were designing Python from scratch right now now - which name would you choose `__build__` or `build` for the temporary directory? 2. Is the Python 3.x already mature enough to deny any improvements (considering these are improvements) for the 3.4 version?
If the name of the build directory bothers you you can change it by adding two lines to ~/.pydistutils.cfg:
[build] build-base = __build__