"Barry A. Warsaw" wrote:
So for Knowbots we wrote a small module called pathhack that all entry level executables imported. pathhack was good because it put all that sys.path munging nonsense in one place so it was manageable from a s/w engineering standpoint. But it sucked because those executables had to /find/ pathhack.py! Bootstrap lossage (we've actually gone back to sys.path.insert).
Yes, exactly the problem I had, bootstraping the import of pathhack. Actually it gets worse because Python imports exceptions.py, site.py and sitecustomize.py during Py_Initialize(), so if you are having a really bad day, you might pick up the wrong version of those. AFAIK, the only way to solve that currently is to use freeze to build pathhack into the binary executable. That is what I do anyway. But it is not an ideal solution.
What I've been thinking is that Python needs a registry <shudder>.
Yikes! As you say, Window's registry is a mess.
[Lots of good ideas omitted...]
- The system-wide registry can be located in say sys.prefix/lib/python<version>/site-packages. The user registry would reside somewhere in $HOME. This could all be platform specific so that on Windows, maybe the Python registry is integrated with the Windows registry, while in JPython it would be integrated with the standard JPython registry mechanism.
Python already has three directories it knows about: sys.executable is the directory of the interpreter binary, sys.dllfullpath could be the directory of the interpreter as a shared library (I have a patch for this), and there is the directory of the main Python program as given on the command line. Perhaps we can put the registry in one of these directories. That would be consistent on all platforms.
- You should be able to specify registry entries on the command line.
This is vital because I am worried about a bad registry.
- There needs to be defined rules for resolving registry keys b/w system, user, and command line specifications. JPython has some experience here (although there have been requests to change
I am not sure a full registry is required. Once you can control sys.path and can get an accurate import of sitecustomize.py, you can do everything else there. Maybe just a command line option is enough. But I will think about it... Jim Ahlstrom