On 3/9/07, Anthony Baxter
What do people think about the idea of a version-specific PYTHONPATH environment variable? Something like PYTHON25PATH or the like. Reason I ask is that on our production systems, we have a couple of versions of Python being used by different systems. Yes, yes, in a perfect world they'd be all updated at the same time, sure. There's occasionally issues with the PYTHONPATH being pointed at something like .../lib/python2.4/site-packages or the like, and then have issues when python2.3 or some other different version is run. If we allowed people to optionally specify a more specific version this problem would go away.
Few weeks ago I actually needed exactly this functionality. I worked around it with a .pth file installed for each version of python I'm using with the following contents: import sys; sys.path.insert(0, os.path.expanduser("~/pylib%s.%s" % sys.version_info[:2])) import site, os, sys; site.addsitedir(os.path.expanduser("~/pylib%s.%s" % sys.version_info[:2]))