[Distutils] Extending distutils with 3rd party build commands?

[Bob Ippolito]

On Oct 23, 2004, at 13:32, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

> Bob Ippolito wrote:
>> On Oct 23, 2004, at 5:20, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>>> Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Friday 22 October 2004 06:23 pm, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>>>>  > I need an editable file in a system-wide directory such as
>>>>  > site-packages that isn't "owned" by the Python installation.
>>>
>>>
>>> This already exists in the form of:
>>>
>>>     """
>>>         There are three possible config files: distutils.cfg in the
>>>         Distutils installation directory (ie. where the top-level
>>>         Distutils __inst__.py file lives), a file in the user's home
>>>         directory named .pydistutils.cfg on Unix and pydistutils.cfg
>>>         on Windows/Mac, and setup.cfg in the current directory.
>>>         """
>> None of those fit the bill.  The distutils package is owned by the 
>> Python installation, files in user directories or the current 
>> directory are not system-wide.
>
> I don't know what you mean by "owned".
>
> If you'd rather have
> the distutils.cfg file live in /etc/ why not create it there
> and add a symbolic link to the Python site-packages dir ?!

Can't do that, distutils doesn't look in site-packages (this is the 
problem).

> Note that Python itself will never ship with a distutils.cfg
> file.

I'd rather have the distutils.cfg file live in 
$prefix/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages than $prefix/anythingelse.  This is 
not possible with the current version of distutils UNLESS distutils 
lives in site-packages, which is also not possible because 
site-packages comes after the standard library in sys.path.

The only location in the Python installation tree that's explicitly 
marked for modification is site-packages, yet in this case another 
location is being used instead.  This doesn't really make much sense, 
unless distutils is going to become separate from the standard library. 
  distutils.cfg should be treated in the same way as sitecustomize.py 
(not expected to be distributed with Python, therefore sys.path is 
searched).

-bob