[Python-Dev] python package

[Guido van Rossum]

> There is something to be solved here.  Anecdote: I sucked an early
> version of Greg's textwrap.py module into my build directory.  After
> he checked it in, I changed regrtest.py to use textwrap.  This kept
> failing with baffling errors, until I realized I was still picking
> up an incompatible textwrap.py from the build directory.  So I got
> rid of the latter.  Somewhere in between, I synched my desktop and
> laptop machines and so got another copy on my laptop that way, which
> I didn't notice.  When I got home and synched the laptop back to the
> desktop, it then restored the deleted testwrap.py to the desktop
> machine, and I got the same round of impossible errors all over
> again.  I deleted it from home machine again, but the next time I
> used my laptop to run the test suite got the impossible errors yet
> another time -- and had synched the machines again in the meantime
> so that it once again showed up on the desktop disk.

This just shows that having the current directory on sys.path
(especially at the front) causes problems.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)