[Catalog-sig] Use user-specific site-packages by default?

[Carl Meyer]

On 02/04/2013 07:42 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> I think the biggest problem with this idea is going to be backwards
> compatibility. It's a good idea but it might need to be done as
> a "if we don't have permissions to write to the site-packages directory
> fail with a good error message and recommend user-packages or
> virtualenv.

Hmm, I don't see any backwards-compatibility problem with simply going
ahead and switching to user-site-packages if system site-packages aren't
writable. It's not like that would break any workflow that currently
works, presuming pip actually tests for ability to write to system
site-packages, rather than testing for userid 0 or some such (which
seems potentially cross-platform problematic anyway).

Carl