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Author ncoghlan
Recipients ipatrol, loewis, ncoghlan, r.david.murray
Date 2011-04-22.04:14:28
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Message-id <1303445671.17.0.453637664383.issue9228@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
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That's not correct - we've merely pointed out that it isn't as easy as most people seem to think.

For the POSIX world, there is a version management scheme based on symlinks in /usr/bin (or /usr/local/bin) and it is easy to add and remove entries independently.

PATH on windows, on the other hand, is a size limited string that can easily exceed the bounds on development machines due to the absurdly long installation paths used by many Windows development tools (with Visual Studio itself being one of the worst offenders).

PEP 397 goes into some detail as to how the (lack of) version management is an issue for the automatically created file associations, and similar problems exist for the command line equivalents.

Batch files that launch development environments with changes to set PATH/PATHEXT/INCLUDES/LIBS etc correctly are not an uncommon sight in Windows development, so including the correct Python directory just becomes one more line in the launch scripts.

Non-command line users simply rely on the existing start menu shortcuts and the file associations to launch double-clicked files.

That limits the beneficiaries of this change to people that:
1. Want to use the command line; and
2. Do not already have a custom "Development Environment" command line launch script.

Fixing this is NOT trivial, and, to my knowledge, we have never been offered a patch that implements it.
History
Date User Action Args
2011-04-22 04:14:31ncoghlansetrecipients: + ncoghlan, loewis, r.david.murray, ipatrol
2011-04-22 04:14:31ncoghlansetmessageid: <1303445671.17.0.453637664383.issue9228@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
2011-04-22 04:14:29ncoghlanlinkissue9228 messages
2011-04-22 04:14:28ncoghlancreate