I think that would break /more/ people, since I expect that far fewer people explicitly set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE than those who leave it unset. Seems like this is a relatively innocuous mode of breakage too, in that the index file is a completely ephemeral bit of data. Failure to generate a new index would be pretty apparent in web frontend when new metrics fail to appear, attempts to create a new index at a non-valid location would result in an exception and an email from cron.