On 3/9/07, Anthony Baxter <anthony@interlink.com.au> wrote:

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]))