Eryk Sun <[email protected]> added the comment:
> You can build a cross-platform wrapper on top of native behaviour
> (witness `shutil.which`) but you can't do the opposite.
Nothing would prevent adding a parameter to use the platform semantics, if that
had been in the design from the outset. But it's not something we should change
at this stage. It's too fundamental.
> I'm not convinced that using `shutil.which` is the right
> answer for anything other than "python".
Actually, I think shutil.which() is the right answer generally (within the
filesystem scope) except for "python", for which sys.executable is usually what
people want, i.e. the current interpreter. A PATH search via
shutil.which('python') doesn't necessarily find the current interpreter, if
anything at all. So I'm not arguing against advice to use sys.executable, but
rather that recommmending shutil.which() should be done in a more generic way
that's separate from the "python" problem.
For platform semantics, I'd prefer a link to the CreateProcessW docs, with
advice to read about the lpApplicationName parameter with respect to
`executable` and lpCommandLine with respect to `args` and the platform search
semantics. The CreateProcessW docs are rather long and off-putting, so I think
it helps to narrow it down for people, and explicitly map between Popen() and
CreateProcessW parameters.
Over the years, I've come across many forum questions in which novice users
waste days on problems with respect to Windows quirks that can be resolved in a
minute or so by someone with knowledge and experience. They get lots of advice
with good intentions from programmers who only have POSIX experience (the
Python ecosystem online is still heavily dominated by POSIX, despite the number
of Windows users), and it's mostly wrong advice and a waste of their time (not
even a learning experience). Documenting platform inconsistencies helps
experienced programmers to use the docs in order to help novice programmers.
It's not necessarily about helping novices directly. Often just a nudge in the
right direction is enough.
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<https://bugs.python.org/issue42041>
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