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

[Richard Boulton]

Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:
> -On [20080502 10:50], Steve Holden (steve at holdenweb.com) wrote:
>> 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 +1 on just using $HOME/.local, but otherwise $HOME/.python makes sense
> too. $HOME/.python.d doesn't do it for me, too clunky (and hardly used if I
> look at my .files in $HOME).

I'd vote for $HOME/.local if asked.  I agree with most, if not all, of 
the arguments posted in favour of this, but would also like to point out 
the XDG-basedir specification: 
http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html

This specification concerns where to put data files rather than 
libraries, but the relevance here is that the default location to put 
user-specific files according to it is in $HOME/.local/share

Whilst by no means universally followed, uptake amongst Gnome and GTK 
applications seems to be rising - I certainly have a load of stuff in 
.local/share/ without ever having configured anything away from the 
Ubuntu install defaults.  So, on Ubuntu computers at least, it seems 
likely that a $HOME/.local/ directory will already exist, with the 
beginnings of a unix style layout inside it.

-- 
Richard