[Python-Dev] proto-pep: plugin proposal (for unittest)

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Aug 1, 2010, at 3:52 PM, Ronald Oussoren wrote:

> 
> On 1 Aug, 2010, at 17:22, Éric Araujo wrote:
> 
>>> Speaking of which... Your documentation says it's named ~/unittest.cfg,
>>> could you make this a file in the user base (that is, the prefix where
>>> 'setup.py install --user' will install files)?
>> 
>> Putting .pydistutils.cfg .pypirc .unittest2.cfg .idlerc and possibly
>> other in the user home directory (or %APPDATA% on win32 and
>> what-have-you on Mac) is unnecessary clutter. However, $PYTHONUSERBASE
>> is not the right directory for configuration files, as pointed in
>> http://bugs.python.org/issue7175
>> 
>> It would be nice to agree on a ~/.python (resp. %APPADATA%/Python) or
>> $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/python directory and put config files there.
> 
> ~/Library/Python would be a good location on OSX, even if the 100% formally correct location would be ~/Preferences/Python (at least of framework builds, unix-style builds may want to follow the unix convention).

"100% formally" speaking, MacOS behaves like UNIX in many ways.  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Mac_OS_X_and_Mac_OS_X_Server>

It's fine to have a mac-pathname-convention-following place for such data, but please _also_ respect the UNIX-y version on the Mac.  The only possible outcome of python on the Mac respect only Mac pathnames is to have automation scripts that work fine on BSD and Linux, but then break when you try to run them on a Mac.  There is really no benefit to intentionally avoiding honoring the UNIX conventions.  (For another example, note that although Python resides in /System/Library, on the mac, the thing that's in your $PATH when you're using a terminal is the symlink in /usr/bin/python.)

Also, no, "~/Preferences" isn't the right place for it either; there's no such thing.  You probably meant "~/Library/Preferences".  I'd say that since ~/Library/Python is already used, there's no particular reason to add a new ~/Library/Preferences/Python location.  After all, if you really care a lot about platform conventions, you should put it in ~/Library/Preferences/org.python.distutils.plist, but I don't see what benefit that extra complexity would have for anyone.