* Philipp A. <flying-sheep@web.de> [2015-09-01 08:00:21 +0000]:
There is a beautiful little module that does things right and is easy to use: appdirs <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/appdirs>
TI think this is a *really* good candidate for the stdlib since this functionality is useful for everything that needs a cache or config (so not only GUI and CLI applications, but also scripts that download and cache stuff from the internet for faster re-running)
+1 from me as well. Another source for inspirations might be the QStandardPaths class from the Qt library (which is C++, but I'm using QStandardPaths in my PyQt applicaiton): http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qstandardpaths.html They have a QStandardPath::writableLocation which gives you exactly one path to write to, a QStandardPath::standardLocations which gives you a list of paths, and a QStandardPath::locate which locates your config based on a name. They also had the issue with changing standards such as Local/Roaming appdata on Windows, and solved it by introducing more enum values to the StandardLocation enum: QStandardPaths::DataLocation Returns the same value as AppLocalDataLocation. This enumeration value is deprecated. Using AppDataLocation is preferable since on Windows, the roaming path is recommended. QStandardPaths::AppDataLocation Returns a directory location where persistent application data can be stored. This is an application-specific directory. To obtain a path to store data to be shared with other applications, use QStandardPaths::GenericDataLocation. The returned path is never empty. On the Windows operating system, this returns the roaming path. This enum value was added in Qt 5.4. QStandardPaths::AppLocalDataLocation Returns the local settings path on the Windows operating system. On all other platforms, it returns the same value as AppDataLocation. This enum value was added in Qt 5.4. Florian -- http://www.the-compiler.org | me@the-compiler.org (Mail/XMPP) GPG: 916E B0C8 FD55 A072 | http://the-compiler.org/pubkey.asc I love long mails! | http://email.is-not-s.ms/