<html><body>On 09:34 am, jack.jansen@cwi.nl wrote:<br /><br />>There's another standard place that is searched on MacOS: a per-user<br />>package directory ~/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages (the name "site-<br />>packages" is a misnomer, really). Standardising something here is<br />>less important than for vendor-packages (as the effect can easily be<br />>gotten by adding things to PYTHONPATH) but it has one advantage:<br />>distutils and such could be taught about it and provide an option to<br />>install either systemwide or for the current user only.<br /><br />Yes, let's do that, please.  I've long been annoyed that site.py sets up a local user installation directory, a very useful feature, but _only_ on OS X.  I've long since promoted my personal hack to add a local user installation directory into a public project -- divmod's "Combinator" -- but it would definitely be preferable for Python to do something sane by default (and have setuptools et. al. support it).<br /><br />I'd suggest using "~/.local/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages" for the "official" UNIX installation location, since it's what we're already using, and ~/.local seems like a convention being slowly adopted by GNOME and the like.  I don't know the cultural equivalent in Windows - "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\PythonXX" maybe?<br /><br />It would be nice if site.py would do this in the same place as it sets up the "darwin"-specific path, and to set that path as a module global, so packaging tools could use "site.userinstdir" or something.  Right now, if it's present, it's just some random entry on sys.path.<br /></body></html>