[Distutils] Easy install, making "Traditional" PYTHONPATH-based Installation work better

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 02:16 PM 2/5/2006 -0500, Jim Fulton wrote:
>It's too bad setuptools isn't in the standard library. If it was, I'd
>probably just stick all my eggs and scripts in the same place and be
>done ith it. :)  It's still tempting.

Note that it's only actually necessary for *pkg_resources* to be 
importable; you don't have to have all of setuptools.  If you installed 
pkg_resources.py to your target directory, your whole plan would work just 
fine.

By the way, note that if people are developing from source, you probably 
want to use 'setup.py develop' rather than 'easy_install', since it allows 
you to edit the code and continue to run.  The 'develop' command should 
work the same with all this, just make sure there's a pkg_resources.py in 
the target directory when you actually run your scripts.

Indeed, given your requirements as I understand them, that should really be 
all you need.  You don't need a custom site-dirs, you need only configure 
the installation directory (--install-dir) for easy_install and 
develop.  Develop inherits configuration from easy_install, so a 
~/.pydistutils.cfg like this:

    [easy_install]
    install_dir = wherever

should do the trick as long as wherever/pkg_resources.py exists.