[Distutils] deprecating pip install --target

[Wolfgang Maier]

On 29.02.2016 17:00, Wolfgang Maier wrote:
>
> I just discovered a way that lets you do just that, but before using it
> for my own code I'd like to know whether you would consider it a weird
> hack that will probably not work in the future or something reasonable
> that could be used in production code? Here's the trick:
>
> write a temporary distutils setup.cfg file in the current working
> directory with the content:
>
> [install]
> install-lib=abspath/to/target_dir
>
> then run pip from that directory like so:
>
> pip install packagexy --prefix abspath/to/target_dir
>
> Of note, combining a local setup.cfg file and --prefix like this isn't
> documented and to me it wasn't even clear whether the file would be
> expected in the current working directory that pip gets run in or in the
> downloaded package.
>

Answering my own question: its a messy hack that will not work from a 
virtualenv because distutils will ignore the local cfg file then.