[Distutils] shebang line modified by setuptools

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Sun Apr 13 00:38:56 CEST 2008


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On Apr 12, 2008, at 6:26 PM, Cliff Wells wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2008-04-12 at 17:53 -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>> At 12:30 PM 4/12/2008 -0700, Cliff Wells wrote:
>>> PATH is *supposed* to affect applications.
>>
>> It affects which application you should run, not which interpreter
>> you run the application with.
>
> I think that's splitting hairs and pretty much just made up to defend
> your position.  Regardless, ultimately it's dead wrong.  Of *course*  
> it
> should affect which interpreter you run.  If I install a patched  
> version
> of Python (or Perl, or PHP, or whatever), into /usr/local/bin and put
> that before /usr/bin in the PATH, I most absolutely expect that to be
> the interpreter that is used, regardless of what was used at the time
> the app was installed.  If this breaks the application, it's fairly
> straightforward to adjust the PATH to fix it.  Most importantly, it's
> something that a Unix admin (vs a Python programmer) can be expected  
> to
> know.

Many operating systems and distributions now use Python extensively.   
Those should absolutely hardcode the #! line to use the system Python  
and should not in any way be affected by my $PATH.  I've seen too many  
situations where changing $PATH breaks some aspect of the OS.

I happen to think that setuptools is doing the right thing here, but  
it would be nice to have an override.

- -Barry

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