On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 9:15 PM, P.J. Eby <pje@telecommunity.com> wrote:

At 08:53 PM 4/10/2009 -0700, Buck wrote:

I see the kernel version and architecture, but this is insufficient;
RedHat 4 and RedHat 5 both use a 2.6 kernel, but the difference in
provided libraries are sufficient to make many (most?) "impure"
libraries stop working ( numpy, python-ldap, and hashlib for
examples).

easy_install apparently knows when packages are platform-dependant,
and the necessary directory is sys.exec_prefix (or maybe better:
distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib(plat_specific=1) ), so this seems
like an easy change. Would a patch be accepted?

It would be a pretty major patch, since the distutils logic that's used for determining the installation directory is applied long before easy_install even knows what it's installing (and therefore, whether it's platform dependent).

It would probably be a lot easier to improve the platform string generation and comparison logic, as has been done for OS X.