[Python-ideas] A standard location for Python configuration files.

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 6:36 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> Tarek Ziadé writes:
>
>  > I can understand the concerns about ~/.python but I find ~/.python.d/
>  > rather cryptic.
>
> True, but it's an existing convention quite widely used.
>  Mac OS X
> itself has at least nine.
That increases by more than an order of
> magnitude on my system if I don't filter "/opt/local" (MacPorts).  I'm
> not even going to bother trying to count on Gentoo Linux.

If we stick to per-user configuration files located in ~, the only one
I have found
on my Mac OS X and Debian was from Pylint (.pylint.d) (I use MacPorts on Mac)

But others known softwares I have don't use .d for their config directories:

Mac:
- .dropbox/
- .macports/
- .cups/

Debian:
- .aptitude/
- .ipython/
- .subversion/

and so on.. (I couldn't find any documented convention yet on those directories)

At the end, I also think ~/.python is the best choice,

If a Python software use this name, it's not a problem since the old places
will still be used, but with a deprecation warning, meaning that the
incriminated
software will have until Python 2.8 and 3.3 to change its
configuration filename.

Tarek