[Python-Dev] [Python-3000] Reminder: last alphas next Wednesday 07-May-2008

[glyph at divmod.com]

On 3 May, 11:34 pm, fdrake at acm.org wrote:
>On May 3, 2008, at 7:51 AM, skip at pobox.com wrote:
>>Fred asked for a --prefix flag (which is what I was voting on).  I 
>>don't
>>really care what you do by default as long as you give me a way to  do 
>>it
>>differently.
>
>What's most interesting (to me) is that no one's commented on my note 
>that my preferred approach would be that there's no default at all; 
>the location would have to be specified explicitly.  Whether on the 
>command line or in the distutils configuration doesn't matter, but 
>explicitness should be required.

I thought I responded to it in my initial response, but let me be 
clearer.

First, Skip, I *only* care about the default behavior.  There's already 
a way to do it differently: PYTHONPATH.  So, Fred, I think what you're 
arguing for is to drop this feature entirely.  Or is there some other 
use for a new way to allow users to explicitly add something to 
sys.path, aside from PYTHONPATH?  It seems that it would add more 
complexity and I can't see what the value would be.

As I've said a dozen times in this thread already, the feature I'd like 
to get from a per-user installation location is that 'setup.py install', 
or at least some completely canonical distutils incantation, should 
work, by default, for non-root users; ideally non-administrators on 
windows as well as non-root users on unixish platforms.