[issue33944] Deprecate and remove pth files

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Barry A. Warsaw <barry at python.org> added the comment:

On Feb 26, 2019, at 05:19, Nick Coghlan <report at bugs.python.org> wrote:
> 
> I just don't want to lose the "add this location to sys.path" behaviour that exists for lines in pth files that *don't* start with "import ", since that has plenty of legitimate use cases, and the only downside of overusing it is an excessively long default sys.path (which has far more consistent and obvious symptoms than the arbitrary code execution case can lead to).

It’s also very difficult to debug because pth loading usually happens before the user has a chance to intervene with a debugger.  This means mysterious things can happen, like different versions of a package getting imported than you expect.

Extending sys.path is a useful use case, but doing so in pth files is problematic.

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue33944>
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