[Distutils] Some clarifications and/or corrections to PEP 376

[PJ Eby]

On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> If you move the files, other things can potentially break, too. For example,
> any scripts installed will have their shebangs adjusted to point to a
> particular interpreter, e.g. a venv's interpreter. If they get moved to a
> different location, the shebang lines may become invalid.
>
> I don't believe that we have to support such moving of files outside of the
> knowledge of packaging tools.

FWIW, the original reason I argued for relative paths in PEP 376 is
supporting installations that are shared across architectures for
cross-platform development.  At OSAF, it was common to have a single
installation directory shared by a Linux, Mac, *and* Windows machine
simultaneously.  Absolute paths would break in such a scenario, as
each accessing machine would see a different absolute path.  Some of
setuptools' design is specifically mangled to handle this kind of
thing.