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

[P.J. Eby]

At 09:54 PM 6/7/2011 -0700, James wrote:
>On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 6:30 PM, P.J. Eby 
><<mailto:pje at telecommunity.com>pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>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.
>
>I'm seeing it make up the path and then fail in a copytree since the 
>computed dest directory in my case doesn't exist So I'm not exactly 
>sure what you mean when you say it doesn't.

Unless you override it, easy_install asks the distutils where to 
install things.  So, the "made up path" you're referring to came from 
the distutils.  (Which has yet *another* set of code to generate the path(s)!)

If you set "DISTUTILS_DEBUG=yes" in your environment variables, and 
run the easy_install again, you'll see exactly where every setting 
comes from.  The output of get_site_dirs() is *not* used to determine 
the installation path, only to *validate* it.


>(And unfortunately, there is no way to obtain this list from the 
>site module directly.)
>
>I guess that is the nub, oh well.
>
>cheers,
>- James