On 7 December 2013 11:10, Michael Jansen <i...@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 _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig