[Distutils] shebang line modified by setuptools

[Cliff Wells]

On Sat, 2008-04-12 at 17:53 -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 12:30 PM 4/12/2008 -0700, Cliff Wells wrote:
> >PATH is *supposed* to affect applications.
> 
> It affects which application you should run, not which interpreter 
> you run the application with.

I think that's splitting hairs and pretty much just made up to defend
your position.  Regardless, ultimately it's dead wrong.  Of *course* it
should affect which interpreter you run.  If I install a patched version
of Python (or Perl, or PHP, or whatever), into /usr/local/bin and put
that before /usr/bin in the PATH, I most absolutely expect that to be
the interpreter that is used, regardless of what was used at the time
the app was installed.  If this breaks the application, it's fairly
straightforward to adjust the PATH to fix it.  Most importantly, it's
something that a Unix admin (vs a Python programmer) can be expected to
know.

Anyway, regardless of who's correct concerning this issue (we can agree
to disagree), I'm cannot understand why you'd want Python to behave
differently (from a deployment standpoint) than other languages.  If you
want sysadmins to hate deploying Python apps, you are on the right road
(make it unusual and require special Python knowledge to do "right").
In fact, "rightness" has little to do with it.  Many conventions and
standards aren't "right", but they continue to exist because that's what
is understood.  Being "right" at the expense of being non-standard isn't
necessarily a good choice.

Regards,
Cliff