> From: PJ Eby <p...@telecommunity.com>
> FWIW, the original reason I argued for relative paths in PEP 376 is
> supporting installations that are shared across architectures for
> cross-platform development. At OSAF, it was common to have a single
> installation directory shared by a Linux, Mac, *and* Windows machine
> simultaneously. Absolute paths would break in such a scenario, as
> each accessing machine would see a different absolute path. Some of
> setuptools' design is specifically mangled to handle this kind of
> thing.
Is this a mainstream use case, though? I'm not dead set against relative paths,
but looking for simplicity if possible. Nowadays the thinking seems to be
around using isolated environments even on a single platform, rather than
trying to share across projects. After all, disk space is cheap. The other
thing is that using *only* relative paths doesn't cut it - there are
circumstances where you write files outside site-packages, so you would need
absolute paths for those files (or incredibly convoluted relative ones), and
that wouldn't work well in the OSAF scenario you described, anyway.
Regards,
Vinay Sajip
_______________________________________________
Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
