[Python-Dev] Reminder: last alphas next Wednesday 07-May-2008

[Steve Holden]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I stand corrected on a few points. You've convinced me that ~/lib/ is
> wrong. But I still don't like ~/.local/; not in the last place because
> it's not any more local than any other dot files or directories. The
> "symmetry" with /usr/local/ is pretty weak, and certainly won't help
> beginning users.
> 
So it's the *name* you don't like rather than the invisibility?

> As a compromise, I'm okay with ~/Python/. I would like to be able to
> say that the user explicitly has to set an environment variable in
> order to benefit from this feature, just like with $PYTHONPATH and
> $PYTHONSTARTUP. But that might defeat the point of making this easy to
> use for noobs.
> 
Groan. Then everyone else realizes what a "great idea" this is, and we 
see ~/Perl/, ~/Ruby/, ~/C# (that'll screw the Microsoft users, a 
directory with a comment market in its name), ~/Lisp/ and the rest? I 
don't think people would thank us for that in the long term.

I'm about +10 on invisibility, for the simple reason that "hiding the 
mechanism" is the right thing to do for naive users, who are the most 
likely to screw things up if given the chance and the most likely to be 
unaware of dot-name directories. If you don't like ~/.local/ then please 
consider ~/.private/ or ~/.personal/ or something else, but don't 
gratuitously add a visible subdirectory.

> On OS X I think we should put this somewhere under ~/Library/. Just
> put it in a different place than where the Python framework puts its
> stuff.
> 
Nothing to say about OS X.

One day Windows might start to respect the "hidden dot" convention, but 
perhaps in the interim we could create a (Windows-hidden) ~/.private/? 
Assuming we could work out where to put it ;-)

> On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 8:25 PM,  <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
[much good sense]

regards
  Steve
-- 
Steve Holden        +1 571 484 6266   +1 800 494 3119
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