[Distutils] PEP 376 for Distutils

[P.J. Eby]

At 10:03 PM 2/25/2009 +0000, Floris Bruynooghe wrote:
>It's interesting to point out what seems to be planned for Debian:
>http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/02/msg00431.html
>
>Quoting just the relevant part:
>
>"""
>Local installation path
>-----------------------
>
>When installing Python modules using distutils, the resulting files
>end up in the same location wether they are installed by a Debian
>package, or by a local user or administrator, unless the installation
>path is overwritten on the command line.  Compare this with most
>software based on autoconf, where an explicit prefix has to be
>provided for the packaging, while the default install installs into
>/usr/local.  For new Python versions packaged in Debian this will
>change so that an installation into /usr (not /usr/local) requires an
>extra option to distutils install command (--install-layout=deb).  To
>avoid breaking the packaging of existing code the distutils install
>command for 2.4 and 2.5 will just accept this option and ignore it.

I wonder why they don't just use the sitewide distutils.cfg file, 
which would let them configure user-installed packages to go to 
somewhere else, e.g.:

[install]
prefix = /usr/local

(And of course the build tools could specify different options.)