[Distutils] does easy_install.py need to guess the site-packages path?

[P.J. Eby]

At 12:00 AM 6/7/2011 -0700, James wrote:
>As an example I'm looking at setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg, can 
>someone tell me why setuptools/command/east_install.py in 
>get_site_dirs() does its own computation of where site-packages is? 
>As of 2.7 there are already 4 separate places in the python where 
>this path is computed. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see 
>why an egg would have an opinion on this matter.

It doesn't do that in order to know where to install things; it does 
it to know what places are *safe* to install things that need .pth support.

(And unfortunately, there is no way to obtain this list from the site 
module directly.)