On Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 8:32 PM Finn Mason wrote:

It would be a good idea to add something like appdirs to the stdlib. Maybe something like os.path.userdata() (as an example name). I have four questions:

1. What should the functions be called, and module should they go in? I personally say os.path module, with names such as userdata() for consistency with the rest of the os module.

2. Should the functions take the app name and author, or just return the base path, e.g. ~/. local/share? The latter makes more sense to me if I had to pick one, but my personal recommendation would be to make the name and author optional arguments, so userdata() returned (on Linux) ~/.local/share, but userdata(appname="foo") returned ~/.local/share/foo. This seems to be the behavior of the appdirs functions.

3. Should we include something like the AppDirs class, which is a wrapper of sorts for the functions? I personally say no, it's not necessary or important.

4. Should this also be added to pathlib? I say definitely, probably in the form of class constructors (e.g. Path.user_data()).

Tildes would be expanded, of course. (I forgot to mention that.) -- Finn (Mobile) --

Finn (Mobile)

On Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 5:35 PM Christopher Barker wrote:

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On Wed, Dec 15, 2021 at 4:29 PM Christopher Barker wrote:

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On Wed, Dec 15, 2021 at 2:57 PM Neil Girdhar wrote:

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+1 for appdirs. It's a shame that more projects don't yet use it.

I agree -- I've wanted something like that for years in the stdlib.

wxPython has wx.StandardPaths -- and it's really handy. But a wrapper around a C++ version, so not useful outside of wx.

-CHB

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On Wednesday, December 15, 2021 at 9:03:07 AM UTC-5 Matt del Valle wrote:

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There is appdirs which does precisely what you're looking for:

https://pypi.org/project/appdirs/

That said, it does seem to be a core bit of functionality that would be nice to have in the os and pathlib modules without needing an external dependency. I'm not going to weigh in on the pros/cons of adding it to the stdlib, I'll leave that to others who I'm sure will have strong opinions on the matter :)

On Wed, Dec 15, 2021 at 1:47 PM JGoutin via Python-ideas < python...@python.org> wrote:

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Hello,

The idea is to add 3 functions to get "config", "data" and "cache" directories that are commonly used to store application files in user home / system.

This look very straightforward to get theses directories path, but in practices it depends on many factors like OS, environnement variables, user or system dir.

For instance, with the "config" directory: * Linux, user: os.path.join(os.getenv("XDG_CONFIG_HOME", os.path.expanduser("~/.config")), app_name) * Linux, system: os.path.join("/etc", app_name) * Windows, user: os.path.join(os.path.expandvars("%APPDATA%"), app_name) * Windows, system: os.path.join(os.path.expandvars("%CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA%"), app_name)

For linux, the full spec is here: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

I see many applications that just use "~/.app_name" to not have to handle theses cases.

The functions prototypes may look like and may be added to "shutil" (or "os.path" ?):

def getcachedir(app_name: str=None, system: bool=False):

With * app_name: The application name * system: If the required directory is the systemd directory or user direcotry.

This may also be implemented as an external library, but I am not sure I would like add add a dependency to my projects "just for this".

I can implement this if people are interested with this feature. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python...@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-id...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python...@python.org/message/MHEWO4U6S... https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/MHEWO4... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

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-- Christopher Barker, PhD (Chris)

Python Language Consulting - Teaching - Scientific Software Development - Desktop GUI and Web Development - wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython

-- Christopher Barker, PhD (Chris)

Python Language Consulting - Teaching - Scientific Software Development - Desktop GUI and Web Development - wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/PNFWSY... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/