python-dev Summary for 2003-08-01 through 2003-08-15

[Ronald Oussoren]

On Tuesday, 19 August, 2003, at 13:06, Peter Hansen wrote:

> Andrew Dalke wrote:
>>
>> I just use distutils and assume the person installing has told
>> it where to install.  I got confused amoung the options we
>> have now, esp. since there's no "site-packages" under MS
>> Windows.
>
> I'm probably way out of the loop on the discussion, but just in
> case I'm not: there _is_ a site-packages in the MS Windows
> installation of the last couple of major versions of Python.
> Not in, I believe, 2.0, but probably those since.
>
> (Okay, by how much did I miss the point? :-)

Not by too much ;-). The reason for my message to python-dev that was 
mentioned in the summary is that is can be usefull to have more than 
one site-packages directory. If an administrator has installed a python 
in a central location, I cannot add new python packages to the 
site-packages (because I cannot write in that directory). You could use 
PYTHONPATH for that, but having a standard location for user packages 
is more usefull.

BTW: the actual reason I started to think about this is the Python 2.3 
installation that will be in MacOS X. That installation is in the 'OS 
vendor' part of the file system (e.g. /WINNT on Windows), and if I add 
packages that install scripts these will also end up in the vendor part 
of the filesystem. That is not very nice. Most linux distributions have 
the same problem: the site-packages for the vendor-provided python is 
somewhere in /usr/lib, and that directory is owned by the vendor and 
should not contain locally installed software.

And w.r.t. the PEP that was mentioned in the summary, I will write one 
once I find enough time to design and write a useable interface for 
this.

Ronald