[Python-ideas] Add appdirs module to stdlib

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Sep 1 10:56:17 CEST 2015


On 1 September 2015 at 18:00, Philipp A. <flying-sheep at web.de> wrote:
> When defining a place for config files, cache files, and so on, people
> usually hack around in a OS-dependent, misinformed, and therefore wrong way.
>
> Thanks to the tempfile API we at least don’t see people hardcoding /tmp/ too
> much.
>
> There is a beautiful little module that does things right and is easy to
> use: appdirs
>
> TI think this is a *really* good candidate for the stdlib since this
> functionality is useful for everything that needs a cache or config (so not
> only GUI and CLI applications, but also scripts that download and cache
> stuff from the internet for faster re-running)
>
> probably we should build the API around pathlib, since i found myself not
> touching os.path with a barge pole since pathlib exists.
>
> i’ll write a PEP about this soon :)

This sounds like a reasonable idea to me, and we can point folks to
the original appdirs if they need a version-independent alternative.

Depending on the amount of code involved, we could potentially
consider providing this as an API *in* pathlib, rather than needing an
entire new module for the standard library version of it.

Regards,
Nick.

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


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