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

[Richard Jones]

On 5 February 2013 13:45, Carl Meyer <carl at oddbird.net> wrote:
> 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).

Also, the Python toolset has at least once broken backwards
compatibility (the switch to not using site-packages by default in a
virtualenv) which, as far as I'm aware, didn't cause too much agony.


     Richard