customary way of keeping your own Python and module directory in $HOME

[timw.google]

On May 14, 8:55 pm, jmg3... at gmail.com wrote:
> On May 14, 6:00 pm, James Stroud <jstr... at mbi.ucla.edu> wrote:
>
> > jmg3... at gmail.com wrote:
> > [snip], but on *nix,
> > you can compile python with the "--prefix=" option set to a directory in
> > your home dir and install there.
>
> Check.
>
> > I recommend having your own python install if you want a comprehensive
> > approach.
>
> Yup. I dropped the src in ~/src/Python-2.5.1, created a ~/py-2.5.1
> directory, and did
>
> ./configure --prefix=/home/me/py-2.5.1
> make
> make install
>
> and it worked fine. The only other step after that was creating a
> symlink:
>
> cd
> ln -s py-2.5.1 py
>
> and adding /home/me/py/bin to my $PATH.
>
> > Doesn't seem like hyper-paranoid sysadmining is all that efficient, does it?
>
> Well, on a server with many other users, they've pretty much gotta
> keep you confined to your home directory.
>
> My issues have been with keeping a ~/pylib directory for extra
> modules, and reconciling that with setuptools / Easy Install. I'm
> curious to hear how other folks manage their own local module
> directory.

I just do

./configure --prefix=$HOME;make;make install

My PATH  has $HOME/bin, and LD_LIBRARY_PATH has $HOME/lib before the
system bin and lib directories. Everything works just fine. I do the
same thing for everything else I download for personal use when I want
to  use a more up to date version of what's installed. For Windoze,
Python gets installed in C:\Python24 (or C:\Python25 now, I guess) and
you don't need admin rights for that. (Thank you, Python developers!)