[Bug 1588562] Re: Please add ~/.local/bin to the default $PATH

[Taddeo Manzi]

This kind of behaviour (letting pass three years and still not fixing this silly to adhere to a known and used standard) is the exact reason I stopped advicing Ubuntu to people.
Because it is the exact thing that let people say "this shitty GNU/Linux you adviced me does never work! It took me 5 minutes to start noticing bugs!".
It still happens in Ubuntu 19.10.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1588562

Title:
  Please add ~/.local/bin to the default $PATH

Status in bash package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in bash source package in Xenial:
  Fix Released
Status in bash package in Debian:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Starting in Xenial, 'pip install' by default places executables into
  ~/.local/bin. This is the de-facto standard place to put per-user
  executables -- for example, Fedora/Redhat puts it on the $PATH by
  default, and PEP 370 makes it the standard place for unprivileged
  installs of Python packages to put their scripts.

  But unfortunately, Ubuntu's does *not* add this directory to $PATH by
  default, which means that 'pip install' doesn't actually work -- any
  scripts that are installed are inaccessible, and every user has to
  manually add this to their PATH.

  Ubuntu should put ~/.local/bin onto PATH by default.

  Minor details (discussed with @doko at the PyCon sprints):

  - this should go at the beginning of PATH rather than the end, in accordance with Debian policy saying that more-local paths go before more-upstream paths. (This is inconsistent with how Fedora/RH do it, but consistent with how Python itself searches for packages.)
  - this will be added to /etc/skel/profile, so that it won't change any existing user accounts; it will only be applied to user accounts created *after* this change lands
  - unlike ~/bin (which Debian/Ubuntu have supported for ages), it will be added to PATH unconditionally, even if the directory doesn't exist. This is important to avoid a nasty trap for new users, where the first time they try to install a Python package they have to restart their shell. Since this only applies to new accounts, the directory will always start out nonexistent/empty, so having it in $PATH won't cause any unexpected changes in behavior.
  - possibly it would make sense to set this in /etc/environment or /etc/skel/.gnomerc or similar, so that it would also apply to non-shell processes (e.g. if the user wants to add a global key-binding to launch a Python program, then generally ~/.profile *doesn't* affect the environment where this command gets executed, and that can frustrate and confuse users if a command works fine from the terminal but not from a keybinding). But we should defer this discussion for the future, because even if this is a good idea, it isn't a good idea in a Xenial stable update.

  Debian bug: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=820856

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