[issue40377] APPDATA location in Microsoft Store version

[Steve Dower]

Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org> added the comment:

You're welcome! We're all involved - apart from a little bit of startup code, it's exactly the same as the regular install.

Right now, I'd say you have a case that needs the regular installer, in order to avoid the appdata redirection.

As for changing it, it seems that thing have been updated again in last year's 1903 update to make AppData redirection even more transparent (ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/desktop/desktop-to-uwp-behind-the-scenes#file-system ). So the intent is really clear that these file locations are not supposed to be shared (e.g. by printing out the directory backing the app-local modifications).

What's the best option here? Probably for Jupyter to move the files elsewhere, or provide a way to output the relevant contents of the file on the console rather than just printing the path. Either of those would work fine on Python 3.8 and earlier as well.

I'm not even sure that those UWP APIs are guaranteed to give a path to the redirected folder - that would break reading of unredirected files, as the docs are clear that User\Name\AppData is redirected, not the other way around. So I don't know that it's an option. I'm also not aware of any way to disable the redirection within the app, like there is for WOW64 redirections.

Having thought some more, I really do think the best option is for Jupyter to be able to print out the required information. That means its stored files can be safely backed up/restored (or transferred, if put in Roaming) and other applications can "python -m jupyter kernelspec <some new command>" to get all of the info they need. Even if we added a new API here, they'd still have to make a change, so making a change that works well for all runtime versions is probably preferable for them as well.

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components: +Windows
nosy: +paul.moore, tim.golden, zach.ware
type: behavior -> enhancement
versions: +Python 3.9 -Python 3.8

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue40377>
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