Fredrik Lundh wrote:
you tried "import sys; print sys.path" on Windows? It is junk.
not on my machine.
On my Windows machine I get:
['', '.', 'N:/prd/winlease/vest', '.\\DLLs', '.\\lib', '.\\lib\\plat-win', '.\\lib\\lib-tk', 'f:\\bin']
PYTHONPATH is N:/prd/winlease/vest. os.path.dirname(sys.executable) is F:/bin. The others are junk. What do you get? Did you change sys.path from the default?
You must not have used the standard Python installer; if you had used it you wouldn't have had this problem (and perhaps we wouldn't have had this discussion). The problem is that you apparently have installed python.exe in f:\bin. "Modern" Python versions execute some code at startup that comes up with a suitable value for sys.path; the Windows version of this code is in PC/getpathp.c -- I recommend that you study it. This code tries to find the Python install directory by looking for a "landmark" file relative to the executable path, and then adds a bunch of directory entries to the path relative to the install directory. If it fails, it defaults to "." for the install directory. The entries '.\\DLLs', '.\\lib', '.\\lib\\plat-win', '.\\lib\\lib-tk' are all a result of this failing. As long as this works, there is no need for the user (or anyone) to ever set the PYTHONPATH variable -- that variable is only needed to add directories in front of sys.path for stuff that getpathp.c doesn't know about (e.g. PIL, Numeric, etc.). With packagized versions of those modules, even that won't be necessary, because the packages will be dropped in the Python install directory (typically C:\Program Files\Python). I believe that most of your desire to get rid of PYTHONPATH comes from your insistence to bypass the default installer. There's probably a way to install your app in such a way that the getpathp.c algorithm actually succeeds? There's also a separate env variable, PYTHONHOME, which overrides the Python install directory; if getpathp.c sees that it is set, it will bypass the search relative to the executable's path. I take blame for not documenting all this well enough. However I wish you stopped criticizing the design -- I think the design is quite solid. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)