[Distutils] Disposition of C extensions and packages

[Guido van Rossum]

> Good argument, and I think I'm convinced by this point; even though
> duplicating the .py files goes against my grain, that's probably just
> a sign of my age.

Oh, you gen-X'ers thinking you're old...  Have you had your prostate
checked lately? :-)

> But what platform-specific directory should
> packages be installed into?  Is <prefix>/plat-<sys.platform> the right
> place?  Or do we need site-packages/plat-<sys.platform>?  (Yet Another
> default directory added to sys.path -- yuck!)

<exec_prefix>lib/python<version>/site-packages

This is supported by site.py:

"""
This will append site-specific paths to to the module search path.  On
Unix, it starts with sys.prefix and sys.exec_prefix (if different) and
appends lib/python<version>/site-packages as well as lib/site-python.
On other platforms (mainly Mac and Windows), it uses just sys.prefix
(and sys.exec_prefix, if different, but this is unlikely).  The
resulting directories, if they exist, are appended to sys.path, and
also inspected for path configuration files.
"""

(Note that lib/site-python is obsolete!)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)