[Distutils] Buildout 2 and system packages

[Jim Fulton]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 11:11 AM, Ralf Schmitt <ralf at systemexit.de> wrote:
> Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> writes:
>
>>> but I'm curious about the position of the “dist-packages† in the
>>> list:
>>>
>>> 1) why does it ends in the middle?
>>
>> The paths are listed in the order that the corresponding distributions
>> are found when satisfying requirements.  So paths corresponding to the
>> requirements you list will tend to appear earlier than the paths
>> corresponding to their requirements, and so on.
>>
>> In some system installs, many system-installed distributions end
>> up in the same path.
>
> But that's a reason why the site-packages should be moved to the end of
> the paths that are prepended to sys.path:
>
> When pinning a package to a specific version, it may end up *not* being
> used, because site-packages has the same package with a different
> version. If site-packages is at the end, that problem goes away.
>
> Can this be implemented or is there a technical reason for not doing it?

It can't be implemented in any sane way.

The problem is that site-packages doesn't have a predictable
location, as demonstrated by the example given in this thread.  On
some systems, there are multiple directories containing custom
modules.

Jim

--
Jim Fulton
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfulton
Jerky is better than bacon! http://zo.pe/Kqm