New submission from Sandro Tosi <sandro.tosi@gmail.com>: Given I have no knowledge of the windows system, I'm just proxying http://mail.python.org/pipermail/docs/2011-September/005793.html :
Under: http://docs.python.org/install/index.html#inst-how-install-works
It notes "Windows prefix\Lib\site-packages C:\PythonXY\Lib\site-packages" for default values on Windows. In the paragraph following the table is the text: "prefix and exec-prefix stand for the directories that Python is installed to, and where it finds its libraries at run-time. They are always the same under Windows, and very often the same under Unix and Mac OS X. " I don't know if it's hardcoded into Python distributions to use C, but it's not correct. The correct way to identify what most people think of as C is via the %SYSTEMROOT% environment variable, so the path described would be "%SYSTEMROOT%\PythonXY\Lib\site-packages" (This is still not the correct way to do things on Windows, but it at least shouldn't break on systems with a %SYSTEMROOT% other than C. I've seen configurations like that on systems which boot multiple versions of Windows.) <<< ---------- assignee: docs@python components: Documentation messages: 144422 nosy: brian.curtin, docs@python, sandro.tosi, tim.golden priority: normal severity: normal stage: needs patch status: open title: Be more generic when identifying the Windows main dir in installation doc type: behavior versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.2, Python 3.3 _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue13030> _______________________________________