Yeah, sorry Eric (Snow), you're trying to bite off *way* more than is reasonable by proposing to removing sys.path[0] auto-initialisation. While it has its problems, it's also far too entrenched in people's expections of Python's behaviour to consider removing at this late date. The earliest such a radical change could likely be considered is Python 4.

Éric (Araujo): the "just do the right thing" aspect is covered by PEP 395. This is an orthogonal proposal that allows power users the ability to override the automatic initialisation to handle those cases where it goes wrong.

That said, I may still make this suggestion part of PEP 395 rather than a distinct proposal, even though there's no direct dependency (in either direction) between this suggestion and the other ideas in that PEP.