[Python-ideas] Add appdirs module to stdlib

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 2:42 AM, Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas
<python-ideas at python.org> wrote:
> On Sep 1, 2015, at 01:00, 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
>
>
> Is appdirs compatible with the OS X recommendations (as required by the App
> Store). Apple only gives you cache and app data directories; prefs are
> supposed to use NSDefaults API or emulate the file names and formats
> properly, and you have to be sensitive to the sandbox.)

No, AFAICT it doesn't get this right -- it just hard-codes the OS X
directories. It also didn't quite implement the XDG spec correctly
(there's some fallback behavior you're supposed to do if the magic
envvars don't make sense that it skips -- very unusual that this will
matter). And windows I'm not sure about -- the logic in appdirs looked
reasonable to me when I was reviewing this a few months ago, but there
seem to be a bunch of semi-contradictory standards and so it's hard to
know what's even "correct" in the tricky cases.

All of this is probably as much an argument *for* providing the correct
functionality as a standard thing as it is against, but any PEP here
probably needs to be thorough about citing the research to show that
it's actually getting the various platform standards correct.

What makes it particularly difficult is that if you "fix a bug" in a
library like appdirs, so that it starts suddenly returning different
results on some computer somewhere, then what it looks like to the end
user is that their data/settings/whatever have suddenly evaporated and
whatever disk space was being used for caches never gets cleaned up
and so forth. Generally when applications change how they compute
these directories, they also include tricky migration logic to check
both the old and new names, move stuff over if needed, but I'm not
sure how a low-level library like this can support that usefully...

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org