Home Original page

Initial value of sys.path

Mark Hammond MarkH at ActiveState.com
Sun Oct 29 17:47:24 EST 2000 
Paul Moore wrote:

> The initial value for sys.path on WIndows is signiicantly different
> from that on Unix. Specifically, there is no site-packages directory
> on Windows.
> 
> This is clearly a deliberate decision (as far as I can see, it's
> enshrined in site.py, where it depends on os.sep being '/', and in
> distutils/command/install.py, where it is in the INSTALL_SCHEMES
> dictionary.

I believe the deliberate decision was simply to "leave windows alone". 
It wasn't clear at the time how useful the site packages would truly 
turn out to be, and Windows already had special registry support.

I don't think anyone will argue against extending this support into 
Windows, as long as it played well with the existing Windows specific 
mechanisms.  But as has been stated in recent threads, this is OSS, so 
your guess is as good as mine as to _when_ it will get fixed - probably 
when someone with enough motivation cares enough.  Currently, that rules 
me out ;-)  One day it may worry my employer, tho!

Mark.
More information about the Python-list mailing list