[Python-Dev] Fixing #7175: a standard location for Python config files

[Éric Araujo]

>> If the files are shared among all users then /usr/local/<something>
>> seems more reasonable.

Oh, right, I forgot to think about system-wide config files. They have
to be supported by another function in site.

A lot of programs have similar-looking code to get a list of filenames
and then process it with configparser or something else:
find_config_files in Distutils, get_standard_config_files in Docutils,
rcpath in Mercurial. There are different namings to support (rc, .cfg,
.conf, etc.) and also config directories (for Mercurial), but it does
not seem impossible to define a standard function that would benefit
Python itself and other programs.

> Choosing an arbitrary location we think is good on every system is fine
> and non risky I think, as long as Python let the various distribution
> change those paths though configuration.

Don’t you have a bootstrapping problem? How do you know where to look at
the sysconfig file that tells where to look at config files?

> In fact, that's one of the future goal of the sysconfig module I had in mind.

Seems great.

> So let's:
> 
> - define all the default locations for each system
> - define a sysconfig.cfg file that contains all installation paths,
> for each target system
> - change sysconfig.py so it uses it, instead of the global dicts it
> currently has

I wonder if this is so complex that a wiki page or something else would
be better suited than email to iron out the proposal. Or maybe it’s time
for that sysconfig.cfg PEP you planned to do.

Regards