-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Apr 12, 2008, at 6:26 PM, Cliff Wells wrote:
On Sat, 2008-04-12 at 17:53 -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
At 12:30 PM 4/12/2008 -0700, Cliff Wells wrote:
PATH is *supposed* to affect applications.
It affects which application you should run, not which interpreter you run the application with.
I think that's splitting hairs and pretty much just made up to defend your position. Regardless, ultimately it's dead wrong. Of *course* it should affect which interpreter you run. If I install a patched version of Python (or Perl, or PHP, or whatever), into /usr/local/bin and put that before /usr/bin in the PATH, I most absolutely expect that to be the interpreter that is used, regardless of what was used at the time the app was installed. If this breaks the application, it's fairly straightforward to adjust the PATH to fix it. Most importantly, it's something that a Unix admin (vs a Python programmer) can be expected to know.
Many operating systems and distributions now use Python extensively. Those should absolutely hardcode the #! line to use the system Python and should not in any way be affected by my $PATH. I've seen too many situations where changing $PATH breaks some aspect of the OS. I happen to think that setuptools is doing the right thing here, but it would be nice to have an override. - -Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) iQCVAwUBSAE6AXEjvBPtnXfVAQJKuQP+JfqPDweFzQ1hN50XFQbi6InQEqL+b+dY M4UIdl5aS48ozoYIKGgM1aItgt/dfe0imCQkl2/cY9vzjmRRVVzK0RurPHjxyAWT CSFi+FuG54rJV4M0xwnoAZaEHQqo65g35iGz+mMe68ytKaSEt1TgukRzyF6RudBf 3Up+IgC8Kqc= =7t0k -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----