On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 at 17:05, Jeroen Demeyer
On 2018-09-14 16:39, Paul Moore wrote:
My understanding (and I'm not an expert here, so hopefully someone else will confirm or correct) is that yes, the data directory is installed to "the installation root", which is $VIRTUAL_ENV for a virtualenv, and "something else" for non-virtualenvs (I think it's / on Unix and sys.prefix on Windows, no idea what happens for user installs).
More precisely: it's always sys.prefix for non-user installs (which is "/usr" not "/" on my system).
For user installs, it's site.USER_BASE which is "/home/jdemeyer/.local" for me.
I think that this works great, I see nothing to fix here (except being more explicit that absolute paths don't work).
And actually, https://packaging.python.org/guides/distributing-packages-using-setuptools/#... is a reasonably clear explanation of the current behaviour (it doesn't mention USER_BASE - patches accepted, I guess). So I guess you're right, the behaviour is sufficient and documented. As usual, discoverability and getting around the amount of out of date information on the web is an issue, but that's not one that we can really solve with anything other than time and discussions like these. Paul