.pth files?

[insyte at gmail.com]

I'm unclear on how .pth files work.  Some posts imply they can be
arbitrarily named, as long as they include the .pth extension, and can
exist anywhere in the current sys.path.  Other documentation seems to
imply that they must be named <package>.pth, although I'm not sure what
"package" it would be named after.

I used strace to see if I could see which files it was looking for, but
the output didn't show a single attempted stat() or open() of any .pth
files.

I may be barking up the wrong tree with the .pth files, anyway.  Is
there a general "best practice" for appending additional directories to
search for modules?  Specifically, I frequently write utilities that
depend on a shared module or two that I don't particularly want to
stick in the "site-packages" directory.  The layout I generally prefer
is a "lib" dir in the same directory as the assorted scripts.  Clearly,
I could just do a 'sys.path.append["./lib"]', but that seems kludgy.

Any clarifications or recommendations?

Thanks!

-Ben