created by Andrew's setup.py script, *if* we're actually running from
the build directory. (The test for that: whether the sys.path[-1]
ends in "/Modules".)
This has one disadvantage: it imports a fair amount of code from the
distutils package, just in order to be able to calculate the correct
pathname. See if I care. :-)
1. repr(license) will no longer print to stdout and read from stdin;
you have to use license(). `license` is a short message explaining
this.
2. Use lazy initialization so that startup isn't slowed down by the
search for the LICENSE file.
3. repr(license) actually returns the desired string, rather than
printing to stdout and returning ''. (Why didn't we think of this
before?)
4. Use the pythonlabs license URL as the license fallback instead of
the CNRI license handle.
__file__ attributes of already-imported modules to be absolute. This helps
robustify the interpreter against os.chdir() calls from the application.
Only remove setdefaultencoding() from sys if it exists; if this module is
run as a script (since there is a _test() function that gets run), it broke
because the script attempts to remove it again after the import of site
has already done so. This allows the module to be run as a script again.
makepath(): New function, standardizes all pathname normalization in one
place.
default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This safes quite a few cycles
during startup since the first call to .setdefaultencoding() will
initialize the codec registry and the encodings package.
See python-dev for a discussion (Subject: "[Python-Dev] [comp.lang.python] sys.setdefaultencoding (2.0b1)").
Added support to set the default encoding of strings
at startup time to the values defined by the C locale.
The sys.setdefaultencoding() API is deleted after having
set up the encoding, so that user code cannot subsequentely
change the setting. This effectively means that only site.py
may alter the default setting.
how to exit (in a platform dependent way!). We use os.sep to
determine which platform we're on, since I expect that this will work
better for minority platforms.
Guido van Rossum
Martin v. Löwis
Jack Jansen
Barry Warsaw
Fred Drake
Marc-André Lemburg
Fredrik Lundh
Jeremy Hylton