[Python-ideas] Possible Enhancement to py Launcher - set default

[Stephan Houben]

Hi all,

Just want to point out that if tools can accept a config file in
a cross-platform standard location
(perhaps in addition to a platform-specific one),
then that is incredibly useful.

Just search on Github for "dotfiles", and see how many people
store their configuration in a git repo, so they can just go to
a fresh machine, "git clone dotfiles" in their $HOME and be fully set up.

A platform-independent location also simplifies life for us who
use Linux, Windows and MacOs on a daily basis.
(And then there is the fact that these platform "standards" are
only followed very haphazardly anyway, e.g.
Windows Vim uses ~\.vimrc on Windows and not somewhere in $LOCALAPPDATA .)

As an aside, I don't agree with the "appdirs" package on Linux:
XDG != Linux. That may seem pedantry, but while ~/.local is perhaps
not too bad for user-specific config, /etc/xdg is almost certainly the
wrong location for global config any application that is not part of
a desktop environment.
(In fact, such a directory may not exist on a typical headless Linux
install.)

Stephan


2018-02-06 16:44 GMT+01:00 Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com>:

> On 6 February 2018 at 15:23, Eric Fahlgren <ericfahlgren at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Right, different planets, but orbiting the same star.  I was thinking
> about
> > the consolidation of the Windows registry layout a year or two ago, don't
> > recall who spearheaded that (Steve Dower?).  In any case, if the various
> > tools either followed that convention, or we came up with an ini-based
> one
> > that was consistent with it and usable on Unix (.pyconf or something)...
>
> Yep, that would be an informational PEP, defining standards we expect
> Python applications to follow. There's a lot more Python
> *applications* than there are Python *distributions*, and I'm not
> convinced a standard for applications would get much traction (even
> ignoring the need they'd have for backward compatibility) but if
> someone wants to try to get consensus on something, then have fun!
>
> Actually, the `appdirs` project (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/appdirs)
> does exactly this - provides a portable interface for applications to
> store config data in platform-specific locations. The correct answer
> is probably to persuade application developers to use appdirs rather
> than their own schemes.
>
> Pip and py both use appdirs-compatible schemes (py doesn't use appdirs
> itself, as it's not written in Python, but pip does).
>
> pip: appdirs.user_config_dir('pip', appauthor=False, roaming=True)
> py: appdirs.user_config_dir()
>
> You could argue that appdirs offers too many options - but if all
> applications used appdirs, you could have that debate once with the
> appdirs authors, rather than having to persuade every application in
> turn.
>
> > Yeah, our Windows dev environment uses Cygwin, so I'm constantly
> confused.
> > :)
>
> Yuk, Cygwin. I'll refrain from commenting further :-)
>
> > Not sure how to make pip cough up similar verbose output, but when it
> > started complaining about legacy formats, I just followed its directions
> and
> > this works:
> >
> >> ll $USERPROFILE/pip/pip.ini
> > -rw-r--r-- efahlgren 2017-04-30 15:51 'C:/Users/efahlgren/pip/pip.ini'
>
> Backward compatibility. When we moved to the Windows-standard
> location, we left in fallbacks to the old locations. I've no idea
> whether pip sees Cygwin as Windows-like or Unix-like, so anything
> could be going on beyond that.
>
> Paul
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