2.3b2: Slow commands (several seconds) under SunOS / Sparc

[Martin Pool]

On 19 November 2010 08:41, Eric Siegerman <lists08-bzr at davor.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-11-18 at 21:19 +0200, Jari Aalto wrote:
>> Bingo! The evil was in:
>>
>>     PYTHONPATH="/usr/local/lib/python:$PYTHONPATH"
>>
>> Where PYTHONPATH is empty string, causing the effect
>>
>>     PYTHONPATH="/usr/local/lib/python:"
>>
>> Which strangely gets interepreted as if written:
>>
>>     PYTHONPATH="/usr/local/lib/python:."
>
> For future reference, be aware that (at least) PATH and
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH are subject to this kind of error as well, as
> they also interpret a null component as ".".  Python's not the
> strange one here; it's following a well established, if
> unfortunate, tradition.

Is there anywhere we could/should document this, or warn about this,
to avoid problems in future?

Unfortunately I don't know if documentation will work, as people can't
easily identify the problem beyond "it's just slow".

Perhaps we could warn if '.' or '' is in sys.path?  For people running
'./bzr selftest' that's useful; otherwise it's probably a mistake?

-- 
Martin