Tell distutils alternative install directory?

[Huaiyu Zhu]

I must be missing the obvious: Is there a way to tell distutils to install
in a particular directory other than the default site-packages?   In
particular this must be a directory not requiring root permission.

This is useful in the following scenario: I have a project abc with several
versions being developed at the same time.  I want to install them into
~/project/abc/version1 and so on, so that they can be tested by setting
different PYTHONPATH.  I'd be interested to know any alternatives to this
approach as well, if any.

Huaiyu