[Python-Dev] site enhancements (request for review)

[Greg Ewing]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I do that all the time without .pth files -- I just put all the common
> modules in a package and place the package in the directory containing
> the "main" .py files.

That's fine as long as you're willing to put all the
main .py files together in one directory, with everything
else below it, but sometimes it's not convenient to do that.

I had a use for this the other night, involving two
applications which each consisted of multiple .py
files (belonging only to that application) plus some
shared ones. I wanted to have a directory for each
application containing all the files private to that
application.

 > it's too easy to forget about the .pth file and be
> confused when it points to the wrong place.

I don't think I would be confused by that. I would
consider the .pth file to be a part of the source
code of the application, to be maintained along with
it. If I got an ImportError for one of the shared
modules, checking the .pth file would be a natural
thing to do -- just as would checking the sys.path
munging code if it were being done that way. And
a .pth file would be much easier to maintain than
the hairy-looking code you need to write to munge
sys.path in an equivalent way.

> That's also the reason why
> I don't use symlinks or $PYTHONPATH for this purpose.

Another reason for avoiding that is portability. My first
attempt at solving the aforementioned problem used
symlinks. Trouble is, it also had to work on Windows
running under Virtual PC mounting the source directory
from the host system as a file share, and it turns out
that reading a unix symlink from the Windows end just
returns the contents of the link. Aaarrghh! Braindamage!

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc.  |
greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz	   +--------------------------------------+