[Distutils] distlib.mount API design (was: wheels on sys.path clarification (reboot))

[Paul Moore]

On 31 January 2014 08:22, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> More detailed suggestions for improvements are welcome.

Thanks for this. I see no means to set the cache that will be used by
wheel.mount. Are you meant to set the global distlib.resources.cache
value to a user-created Cache instance if you want to control the
location of the cache?

Is the default cache created on demand? In other words, if I set up my
own cache on application startup, will the %LOCALAPPDATA%\.distlib
directory still get created?

The reason I ask is that on Windows, there are people who are
interested in "portable" applications, which have as near to zero
impact on the system as a whole as possible. While I don't have a need
to write such applications in Python right now, I am working a lot
with such applications at the moment, and I'm more aware than usual of
questions such as "does this app leave traces of its presence on the
system?" So I don't have an agenda here, I'm just curious.

Paul