From: M.-A. Lemburg [mailto:mal@lemburg.com]
They should be in the CVS tree of Python on SourceForge. I don't have CVS access, so I can't get at these, unfortunately...
About the change: I think distutils should lookup the path in Python's site.py file - that way you assure that distutils will work on all Python installations rather than only on those which have the site.py patch. Otherwise, Python won't find the packages installed in Lib/site-packages.
I'm not sure what you intend, here. site.py doesn't export this directory - it is just one of the directories which gets added to sys.path in site.py. On Unix, there are more than one such directory (both version-specific and version-independent), so there isn't, in general, just one such directory. I don't know how you could encapsulate this in a way which would not clash with other platforms' policies. The intention of this change was to be the smallest possible change which would work. I believe it (or at least, the patch I sent when I submitted the final version of the PEP) does that for everything except the Windows Installer. I'll have to defer judgement on how best to address that area to others better qualified to comment, but see my message to Thomas for my suggestion. Hope this helps, Paul.