On 2015-09-01 5:22 PM, Nathaniel Smith wrote: [..]
All of this is probably as much an argument*for* providing the correct functionality as a standard thing as it is against, but any PEP here probably needs to be thorough about citing the research to show that it's actually getting the various platform standards correct.
What makes it particularly difficult is that if you "fix a bug" in a library like appdirs, so that it starts suddenly returning different results on some computer somewhere, then what it looks like to the end user is that their data/settings/whatever have suddenly evaporated and whatever disk space was being used for caches never gets cleaned up and so forth. Generally when applications change how they compute these directories, they also include tricky migration logic to check both the old and new names, move stuff over if needed, but I'm not sure how a low-level library like this can support that usefully...
+1 on all points. We really need a PEP for this kind of functionality in the standard library. Yury