[Python-Dev] PEP 376

[Tarek Ziadé]

2010/4/22 Eric Smith <eric at trueblade.com>:
> Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:
>>
>> -On [20100422 10:55], Tarek Ziadé (ziade.tarek at gmail.com) wrote:
>>>
>>> The next big piece is the FHS-compatible handling of resource files,
>>> which will worth a PEP on its own.
>>
>> You do realize, I hope, that FHS is only followed by Linux distributions
>> and
>> not even fully at that. BSD Unixes, for example, have quite some different
>> hier(7) requirements, most notably that /usr/local is used.
>>
>> So is your intent to have a PEP solely for Linux systems?
>>
>
> I believe the intent is to have enough metadata describing the resource
> files that any system could be supported, including FHS.

Yes that's the idea. We want to provide a way in Python, to describe
for each system (Windows included)
default paths for resource files, and to give the ability to system
packagers to change them.

At the end, the developer will be able to say "Foo is a help file",
and leave it up to distutils to install it
at the best place depending on the platform.

Then, he'll be able to say "Let me have Foo" at runtime.  And os
packagers, for example in Ubuntu, will be able to say "for now on,
help files will be located *here*".

We did quite a lot of work already on this during Pycon, see :
http://hg.python.org/distutils2/file/tip/docs/design/wiki.rst

FHS was just our insipiration to list the different targets, because
it's one of the most advanced description in this field.
But we do need to provide default locations under windows as well, and
windows will possibly add new locations, who knows..

Regards
Tarek
-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org