PYTHONPATH not handled as a list anymore

[languitar]

In older versions of fish, PYTHONPATH used to be a list. Since I upgraded to the latest master version this is not the case anymore:

jwienke@cinnabar ~> echo $PYTHONPATH
/homes/jwienke/local/trusty/x86_64/lib/python/site-packages:/homes/jwienke/local/trusty/x86_64/lib/python2.7/site-packages:/homes/jwienke/local/trusty/x86_64/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
jwienke@cinnabar ~> fish --version
fish, version 2.2b1-29-g18d746

[ridiculousfish]

This is deliberate; see #1374. See #2022 for some ideas about what we can do.

[languitar]

Ok, didn't find that issue.

How is PATH currently handled? Because there it still seems to be a list. Maybe a special rule for certain variables?

[ridiculousfish]

Yes, we have a whitelist which is only PATH, MANPATH, and CDPATH.

[languitar]

Can PYTHONPATH be added there? It follows the same semantics and doesn't allow URIs.

[ridiculousfish]

We hope to never change the whitelist, to avoid different versions of fish behaving differently. However we may relax the rules for outgoing variables, so we won't split on colons on importing env vars but will add colons when exporting them. I think there's an issue tracking that idea somewhere. Edit: Found it, #1999. Are you OK closing as a dup of that?

[languitar]

Sure. Thanks for the explanations.

[Hwesta]

For the next person to run into this: I was having the problem where set -xg PYTHONPATH /python/path/1/ /python/path/2/ produced PYTHONPATH=/python/path/1//python/path/2/ which Python couldn't read properly. The workaround seems to be set -xg PYTHONPATH /python/path/1/:/python/path/2/ which allows Python to see a colon-delineated list, even though fish sees it as a string.