[Python-Dev] PEP 376 - Open questions

[Nick Coghlan]

Paul Moore wrote:
> 2009/7/6 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:
> - There are *no* guaranteed absolute locations on Windows, so any such
> oddly-located file would require user interaction to work. Certainly
> bdist_wininst and bdist_msi don't do that.
> - My experiments indicate that bdist_{wininst,msi} are broken with
> respect to absolute paths anyway: they do a --root install to a
> temporary directory (and the absolute paths don't end up in there) and
> then package up that temporary directory.
> 
> I still want to see a real life example that demonstrates that there
> is a genuine issue here. We're spending a lot of energy and complexity
> trying to design a solution to a problem that actually doesn't appear
> to exist in practice...
> 
> (To be honest, I'd be fairly confident in saying that absolute paths
> can be ignored on Windows, subject to some corner cases that I haven't
> thought through yet. My worry is that I don't know what Unix and Mac
> users might do, so I can't just wish away the issue because it can't
> arise on Windows. Can a Unix/Mac user offer a real-world example on
> their own system?)

I thought installing pywin32 based COM objects still involved messing
with the Windows directory, but MS may have improved that in more recent
OS versions. It's been years since I played with win32com objects, and
even then it was just idle experimentation that didn't get very far so I
could easily be misremembering.

For *nix, the obvious use case is installing scripts somewhere like
/usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.

One option is to punt on this whole issue and say if people want to
install stuff outside the Python module heirarchy they should create
their own OS-specific package to manage it (i.e. leave the non-relative
paths to be managed by APT or a Windows installer or whatever).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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