Quoth Fred L. Drake, on 29 March 1999:
site-python/ is the original location, but never had a platform-specific counterpart. site-packages/ was intended to solve this, which is why it comes in both flavors, and deals with version- related issues. In general, 100% Python packages should be installed in site-packages/, because not all packages are sure to work across major version changes: it's too easy to rely on the bahavior of bugs in the library. ;-( This results in the safest (most conservative) installation and allows for faster detection on libraries which are not available for the Python version: ImportError is harder to misinterpret than buggy behavior.
I've sorta been wondering about that myself -- I've had to resort to dissecting Python Makefiles, doing multiple test installations with slight parameter tweaks, and taking careful notes on the whole process to try to figure out what's happening and what Distutils should try to emulate/enforce/whatever.
One thing that bugs me: there doesn't seem to be an elegant way to have multiple sub-versions of Python installed on the same machine, eg. 1.5.1 and 1.5.2b2 (or whatever the latest alpha/beta is at a given time). I have taken to setting prefix=/usr/local/python-1.5.1 and prefix=/usr/local/python-1.5.2b2 respectively, and screwing around with symlinks in /usr/local/bin to get things the way I want them. Is this the best anyone has come up with? It would be nice to subdivide /usr/local/lib/python1.5, but the fact that Python figures out sys.path at runtime seems to preclude this. Are my impressions correct?
Greg