On Thu, 21 Jul 2022 at 16:45, Christopher Barker <pythonchb@gmail.com> wrote:
I still am dumbfounded that this wasn’t platform I dependent in the first place, but you know what essay about hindsight.
Indeed. I've no idea why we had the difference in the first place, but that's water under the bridge at this point.
However, I’m no Windows expert, but I *think* the modern Windows file system(s?) support something like symlinks. It’s an under-the-hood feature, but maybe it’s possible to add a symlink for bin.
Maybe. But symlinks are not available on all Windows systems (they need certain settings enabled) so we need to be able to work without them (the same is true on Unix, of course, as symlink support requires the filesystem to support it, and not all filesystems do, - but that's not relevant here). The long and short of it is that for a significant amount of time, the *best* we can hope for is something that allows tools to support *both* "Scripts" and "bin". Only after something like that has been in place for an extended period (years) will we have any chance of desupporting environments that use "Scripts".
Maybe I’m wrong, and/or it’s not possible on all file systems Python needs to support, in which case *nix systems do support linking, so we could support “Scripts” on all systems.
Just a thought.
I'd strongly encourage anyone who is still interested in pursuing this to at least work on a proof of concept set of changes, rather than just discussing how it would be better than what we're doing at the moment. This has come up enough times now that anyone involved in packaging is pretty much resigned to us not being able to change this, and we're not likely to do anything just because someone says "this is worth doing". However, it's possible we're so resigned to the current situation that we haven't thought of some approach that will work - and if so, the best way to demonstrate that will certainly be to come with working (or at least partly working) code. If people want to speculate on how a change might be implemented, then please go ahead (this is python-ideas, after all). But without someone willing to write code, that's all it's likely to be, speculation. Sorry. Paul