[Distutils] default installs and plugins

[Ian Bicking]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>   This worries me, since I have lots of code that is both
>> package and plugin, and if this is the situation then I'll have to move
>> to non-root installs everywhere I want version isolation.  (Which I
>> actually suspect I'll have to do anyway, but I was hoping that things
>> would at least be usable without it).
> 
> 
> There are a number other custom installation strategies available 
> besides the "virtual python" one, now.  You might check those out on the 
> EasyInstall page.

Incidentally, I went with the administrator installation, but based off 
an environmental variable instead of the home directory.  Except that 
distutils.dist does not substitute environmental variables in 
configuration files, so I had to patch that.  It's a very small change, 
but I don't know if I can really justify submitting it upstream. 
Anyway, now I select my environment (a particular website) by setting an 
environmental variable, but sticking with the same user account.  It's 
actually reasonable that I could login as the user account for the site 
I'm working on, but I kind of prefer always being logged in as myself.

Since I've found it far too difficult to maintain version specifications 
that really keep sites isolated in the way I want, the separate paths 
work much better.

I notice that Ruby Gems have an option to "freeze" the Gems you are 
using, which copies them all to some directory.  In the context of Rails 
that's a subdirectory of the project directory.  I find Rails a bit 
funny, as it jams configuration, runtime stuff like libraries, scripts, 
and the actual code all in one big directory hierarchy.  But anyway, 
simply installing stuff in the environment that I want works well, so 
long as things aren't also globally installed.  We'll probably install 
some stuff globally, but only if it is really stable and we aren't 
involved in development at all (e.g., psycopg).

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org