distutils installation fails in WinNT; sys.exec_prefix empty

[Fred Yankowski]

[I sent the following note to the distutils SIG mailing list on Oct 6,
but there was no reply so I'll try a broader audience.  I hope the
distutils SIG is still alive; it's mission seems essential to the
continued growth of Python use.  Anyway...]

I just downloaded Distutils-0.1.tar.gz (which might be better named
Distutils-0.1.tgz to accommodate WinZip), expanded it, and tried
installing it by running 'python -v setup.py install'.  It ran OK for
a while, then took an exception in _init_nt() in sysconfig.py,
apparently because sys.exec_prefix (and sys.prefix, for that matter)
are both set to '' on my system.

I just installed Python 1.5.2 yesterday, on a WinNT 4.0 (SP 5)
machine.  Other than choosing a non-default installation path
(different volume), I think I took all defaults when running the
Python installer.

Why wouldn't sys.prefix and sys.exec_prefix be set to correct values
after installing on NT?  Did I do something wrong, or is this a bug in
the installer?  Or is the distutils code wrong to expect those values
to be correct?  Is there something I can do to work around the
problem?  I couldn't see any registry key that I could tweak.  I'm
willing to help solve this problem, but I don't know where to look
next.

-- 
Fred Yankowski