[Python-ideas] problems with import

One problem I often encounter is with import search. An example of the problem is with the package mercurial. It has extensions in a subdirectory called 'hgext'. On fedora, I install mercurial using the vendor package. This creates /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/hgext/ Later, I want to try out an extension as a non-privileged user. cd <extension> python setup.py install --user Now I also have ~/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/hgext but python won't search there for extensions. Once if finds the system hgext directory, it won't look also in the local one. Any thoughts?