[Distutils] PEP 513: A Platform Tag for Portable Linux Built Distributions Version

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 2:35 AM, Oscar Benjamin
<oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28 January 2016 at 07:46, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> On further thought, I realized that it actually has to be in the
>> standard library directory / namespace, and can't live in
>> site-packages: for the correct semantics it needs to be inherited by
>> virtualenvs; if it isn't then we'll see confusing rare problems. And
>> virtualenvs inherit the stdlib, but not the site-packages (in
>> general).
>
> Surely virtualenv can be made to import this information from the
> parent environment. It's already virtualenv's job to set up pip etc.
> so that you're ready to install things from PyPI.

This doesn't seem like it would be attractive to distributors to me.
For them, it's just as easy either way to drop a file into
/usr/lib/python3.5/ versus /usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages. But if
you use site-packages/, you have to make sure you also have a patched
virtualenv and pyvenv, and worry about whether your distribution will
ever get used with old versions of virtualenv, etc., whereas if you
drop it into the stdlib directory then it just works robustly
everywhere. I guess we could put some finger-wagging in a PEP telling
them to use site-packages/, patch virtualenv, and eat their
vegetables, but I don't know why they'd listen to us :-).

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org