[Distutils] [buildout] selectively excluding site-packages

[Gary Poster]

On Mar 19, 2010, at 1:59 PM, John Griessen wrote:

> Gary Poster wrote:
>>> Are these any docs on the new features on that branch? If so, where should I look?
>> The user-visible part of the changes is in the z3c.recipe.scripts recipe contained within the zc.buildout checkout, like
>> zc.recipe.egg.  zc.recipe.egg has no user-visible changes and works mostly as before, providing hopefully full backwards
>> compatibility.  z3c.recipe.scripts has the logic to work with a Python that might have some site-packages hanging around.
>> http://svn.zope.org/zc.buildout/branches/gary-8/z3c.recipe.scripts_/src/z3c/recipe/scripts/README.txt?view=auto
>> Note that mixing a system python's site-packages and buildout eggs will, in my guess, always be less stable than trying to
>> simply use a system Python without site-packages at all (the default behavior of the new recipe).  See the discussion in the
>> README file, which touches on the concerns but probably does not go far enough.  That said, for "hysterical" reasons, I'm using
>> the mixing approach right now myself.
> 
> Suppose I'm starting fresh, (newbie at this, but wanting stability and new features).
> How do you best use buildout to
> "simply use a system Python without site-packages at all"?  I'm OK with reading the code for comments.

If you are a newbie, I strongly suggest sticking with the released versions.  What I have done has zero guarantee of Jim merging it.

Moreover, the instructions on how a newbie can use this stuff from source are not worth my time or yours, IMO.

I suspect those warnings are not what you want to hear, but I'm trying to be both helpful and up-front.

On the other hand, if you are asking how you *would* use a system Python if my branches were merged, you would use the new version of zc.buildout, and use z3c.recipe.scripts where you normally would have used zc.recipe.egg, except for the advanced use case of zc.recipe.egg:custom, which should still be used from zc.recipe.egg.  That's it.

Gary