[pypy-dev] autopath obsolete?

[Bob Ippolito]

On Nov 18, 2004, at 1:00 PM, holger krekel wrote:

> [Christian Tismer Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 11:22:53AM +0200]
>> Hi colleagues,
>>
>> I was wondering why we still need stuff like autopath?
>> I simply use a pypy.pth file in my standard python
>> folder which contains the path to pypy, and things
>> work fine.
>> Why do we really need autopath?
>
> The basic idea of autopath is that after you do
>
>     svn co http://codespeak.net/svn/pypy/trunk/src
>
> and then
>
>     python src/pypy/test_all.py
>
> or any other test file or e.g.
>
>     python src/pypy/interpreter/py.py
>
> it just works without _any_ setup/installation steps.
> For the same reason we come with the neccessary
> dependencies to run py.py.

It's not unreasonable to ask people to add src to their PYTHONPATH by 
some means (pth file or otherwise).  Requiring this simple step, common 
to just about every other sane Python package, eliminates the need for 
a distributed autopath entirely.

As Michael has mentioned, it makes sense to have a module that cleans 
sys.path so that you don't have anything crazy in there, but autopath 
as implemented seems like quite an unnecessary hack to me.

I've just committed a smarter implementation that deals with symlinks 
and such more gracefully.

-bob