[Python-ideas] Add appdirs module to stdlib

[Paul Moore]

On 2 September 2015 at 05:38, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
>> This is a fair point. But it's also worth noting that the current
>> state of affairs for many apps is to just bung stuff in ~/whatever.
>> While appdirs may not get things totally right, at least it improves
>> things. And if it (or something similar) were in the stdlib, it would
>> at least provide a level of uniformity.
>
> In about 5 years time. Maybe,

Most of the programs I write are for Python 3.4 at the moment, and
will be for Python 3.5 as soon as it comes out. They won't be
distributed outside of my group at work, if indeed anyone but me uses
them. They won't care about older versions of Python. I don't even
care about cross-platform. But I do want to set up a cache directory,
or save some settings, without thinking *too* hard about where to put
them. I don't want to have an external dependency because I'm forever
running these things from whatever virtualenv I currently have active
(sloppy work habits, I know, but that's the point - not everything is
a nicely structured development project).

For programs that need to support older versions of Python, a backport
should be trivial - I can't see that this would need any particularly
"modern" Python features.

Paul