[Distutils] Some clarifications and/or corrections to PEP 376

[Vinay Sajip]

> From: PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>

> FWIW, the original reason I argued for relative paths in PEP 376 is
> supporting installations that are shared across architectures for
> cross-platform development.  At OSAF, it was common to have a single
> installation directory shared by a Linux, Mac, *and* Windows machine
> simultaneously.  Absolute paths would break in such a scenario, as
> each accessing machine would see a different absolute path.  Some of
> setuptools' design is specifically mangled to handle this kind of
> thing.


Is this a mainstream use case, though? I'm not dead set against relative paths, but looking for simplicity if possible. Nowadays the thinking seems to be around using isolated environments even on a single platform, rather than trying to share across projects. After all, disk space is cheap. The other thing is that using *only* relative paths doesn't cut it - there are circumstances where you write files outside site-packages, so you would need absolute paths for those files (or incredibly convoluted relative ones), and that wouldn't work well in the OSAF scenario you described, anyway.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip