Phillip> Skip, if you want to use a custom install location using Phillip> PYTHONPATH, you need to read this section: Phillip> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#traditional-pythonpath-b... Folks, Please note a couple things: 1. I use pth files, not PYTHONPATH. They are much easier to control than insuring the every user of the system (even the daemon-ish ones) have PYTHONPATH set properly. I have one pth file in the system install. That's the full extent of the pollution of that directory tree. I want to keep it that way. ISTM that setuptools should be able to easily deduce what the default sys.path is, since Python does the heavy lifting of parsing/executing pth files for you: python -c 'import sys ; print ":".join(sys.path)' Voila! Now setuptools should know that /usr/local/mojam/lib/ python2.3/site-packages *is* in sys.path and that I'm not trying to install packages for some sort of offbeat Python installation. 2. I didn't use setuptools directly. In fact, when I executed python setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local/mojam in the Myghty 0.99a source directory I had no idea setuptools would be used at all. Mike Bayer (Myghty's author) tells me that was a requirement because Myghty depends on something called Paste. The whole notion of using setuptools is highly indirect for me. Phillip> Your configuration, however, would be something like: Phillip> [install] Phillip> prefix = /usr/local/mojam Phillip> [easy_install] Phillip> site_dirs = /usr/local/mojam/lib/python2.4/site-packages Phillip> instead of the configurations shown there. I'll take a look. At first blush I'm a bit put off by the notion it seems to promote that somehow using .pth files is wrong. I think you should be able to deal with them straight out of the box, no tricks required, especially considering they are blessed as part of the default site.py, and not likely to go away soon. Phillip> Right; the other option is to use this approach: Phillip> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#creating-a-virtual-pytho... Phillip> There's a 'virtual-python' script linked there that will set it Phillip> up for you; you would run: Phillip> virtual-python.py --prefix=/usr/local/mojam Phillip> to set it up. This should not delete any existing files there, Phillip> just add symlinks and create a /usr/local/mojam/bin/python Phillip> executable that will think its sys.prefix is /usr/local/mojam. Phillip> (It will overwrite /usr/local/mojam/bin/python, though, if it Phillip> already exists.) That's definitely not what I want. I want to "/usr/bin/env python" to resolve to /usr/bin/python in all cases (like when a CGI script executes as nobody or when procmail runs spambayes) but use a single pth file to tell it where my local stuff lives. Such tools are almost certainly never going to have /usr/local/mojam/bin in their PATH. Skip