[Distutils] Clarifying the meaning of the sysconfig "data" directory

[Paul Moore]

On 7 December 2013 11:10, Michael Jansen <info at michael-jansen.biz> wrote:
> I guess we agree here. But people already do that because they have no other
> choice. Nick only wants to document the way it works better. Many people
> already figured this out and use it anyway.

I believe it's an "attractive nuisance" and should not be used except
where necessary. While I'm not a fan of "security by obscurity", the
current documentation limits the damage because only people who have a
real need will investigate it and find out that it works. I'd rather
we had a better solution that helped people do things in a
cross-platform way, but in the absence of that having something that
works, but isn't promoted, is a reasonable status quo.

I have yet to see a use of <data> that isn't specifically for Unix/FHS
conformance. Those uses are fine, but they are *not* portable to
Windows (often they work to an extent, but there are issues - e.g.,
they are unnatural, and they don't work in zipfile or py2exe formats).
To get a standard solution, we need a proper discussion between
Windows users and the various camps from the POSIX users. That's been
tried before, and it's a great way of wasting many months ;-) (It also
needs more Windows users than are generally available - I'm
opinionated, but my use cases are atypical :-))

I don't disagree with clarifying the docs, but let's keep the wording
platform-neutral, and let's not sell it as the ultimate solution, just
"better than nothing, for the moment".
Paul