[Python-Dev] Python install layout and the PATH on win32

[Brian Curtin]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 10:52, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>> In hearing from a couple people who teach python to beginners, this is a
>> substantial hurdle - the first thing they need to do is to edit their
>> environment to add these directories to the PATH.
>
> This is something I never understood. On Windows, it's custom to launch
> programs from the start menu, and Python is easy enough to find on the
> start menu (e.g. by typing "Python"). Why do people want to launch it by
> opening a shell window, then typing python?

I've never thought about doing it otherwise. If I want to run the
C:\Users\brian\example\sample.py script, I'd open a CMD and move to
the example directory and execute the sample script.

The class of about 60 people I taught a few years back at a previous
employer all did the same thing without me specifying. Everyone was
used to working in the command line for other tasks, from using other
languages to running our products, so it was natural to them to run it
that way.

> In any case, I have given up my resistance to the feature request for
> automatic path fiddling several years ago, and was since waiting for
> a contribution of a patch that makes it happen.

I'm working on the changes we discussed at PyCon.
http://bugs.python.org/issue3561 has an version of the patch doing it
the old way - I hope to have the new way figured out soon.