[Python-ideas] Add a site.cfg to keep a persistent list of paths

[Floris Bruynooghe]

[sorry, forgot to include the list address before]

Hi

On 20 October 2010 15:27, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 4:00 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>> But I'm probably not seeing the real issues here.
>>
>> All I would say is, don't let the needs of more unusual configurations
>> over-complicate basic usage.
>
> The trouble is: adding in PYTHONPATH the root of the source of your
> project can be different from what it would be once installed in
> Python.   Now the question is: if 90% of the projects out there would
> work by adding the root, then this is might be overkill. I am afraid
> it's way less though...

I've read your and Ian's responses and still don't understand what
setup.py develop brings to the party which can't be done with simple
PYTHONPATH.  Excuse me if I also completely misunderstand what develop
does but it sounds like it's going to add an in-development version of
a project on a users's sys.path (at the front?) until it's undone
again somehow (is there a "setup.py undevelop"?).  This just seems
dangerous to me since it will affect all python programs run by that
user.

If I understand correctly this whole "develop" dance is for when you
have two inter-depended packages in development at the same time.  If
manually setting PYTHONPATH correctly in this situation is too
complicated then my feeling is there's nothing wrong with some sort of
helper which manipulates PYTHONPATH for you, something like spaw a new
shell and set the environment in that correctly.  But placing things
in files makes this permanent for the user and just seems the wrong
way to go to me.

Again, apologies if I understand the problem wrongly.  But I too am
worried about too many complexities and "magic".  One of my main
issues with setuptools is that it tries to handle my python
environment (sys.path) outside of normally expected python mechanisms
by modifying various custom files.  I would hate to see distutils2
repeat this.

Regards
Floris


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