On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 23:04, Andrew Pennebaker < andrew.penneba...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Please have the Windows installers add the Python installation directory to > the PATH environment variable. The http://bugs.python.org bug tracker is a better place for feature requests like this, of which there have been several over the years. This has become a hotter topic lately with several discussions around the community, and a PEP to provide some similar functionality. I've talked with several educators/trainers around and the lack of a Path installation is the #1 thing that bites their newcomers, and it's an issue that bites them before they've even begun to learn. Many newbies dive in without knowing that they must manually add C:\PythonXY > to PATH. It's yak shaving, something perfectly automatable that should have > been done by the installers way back in Python 1.0. > > Please also add PYTHONROOT\Scripts. It's where cool things like > easy_install.exe are stored. More yak shaving. > A clean installation of Python includes no Scripts directory, so I'm not sure we should be polluting the Path with yet-to-exist directories. An approach could be to have packaging optionally add the scripts directory on the installation of a third-party package. The only potential downside to this is upsetting users who manage multiple > python installations. It's not a problem: they already manually adjust PATH > to their liking. > "Users who manage multiple python installations" is probably a very, very large number, so we have quite the audience to appease, and it actually is a problem. We should not go halfway on this feature and say "if it doesn't work perfectly, you're back to being on your own". I think the likely case is that any path addition feature will read the path, then offer to replace existing instances or append to the end. I haven't yet done any work on this, but my todo list for 3.3 includes adding some path related features to the installer.
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