"Stephen J. Turnbull" writes:
the question being asked is why should users of the daemon process library need to worry about that, separately from other users of lockfiles or mutexes?
Perhaps my mistake is in calling it a “lockfile”. It's actually a rather specific Unix-native concept: the “pidfile”, a combination sentinel, lockfile, and primitive text interface. It isn't even used much like other lockfiles (in that it wouldn't make sense, for example to wrap a context manager around it). I might return the terminology in the PEP back to “pidfile” to be clear. To answer the question, the location of a pidfile warrants specific mention (separate from discussion of lockfiles) in at least two OS standards that I'm aware of, as well as howtos and other discussions. For that reason, it's better to have a simple way to tell a program the desired location and name of its pidfile in particular. -- \ “[I]t is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he | `\ thinks he already knows.” —Epictetus, _Discourses_ | _o__) | Ben Finney