[IPython-dev] Weird PYTHONPATH, etc. issue

[David Warde-Farley]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 5:41 AM, Thomas Spura <tomspur at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> I never had a problem with this setup so far, unless you count the
>> circumvention of the sysadmin a problem...
>> I think it's easier to install anything I need in userspace _again_
>> and you can be sure, that it's consistent and working, but a small
>> overhead is added of course.
>
> But is it possible with a virtualenv to benefit from system-wide
> packages while overriding a few yourself, if the system-wide ones use
> the underhanded setutpools behavior?
>
> Because that's the problem that I've found to be hard to manage with
> setuptools: wanting to keep the system-wide stuff but overlay a few
> personally managed packages to override system ones.  When the system
> ones use regular distutils, that's trivial to do.  But with setuptools
> messing with sys.path at runtime, you end up with the conundrum David
> is in...
>
> Maybe virtualenvs are the solution, it's still unfortunate an entire
> new system has to be devised to protect against setuptools
> aggressively malicious behavior.

Indeed. It turns out, our sysadmin had run into this problem before
with other users but didn't know how to solve it. I told him to
replace easy_install with pip in his site-packages generation script,
and he did so with his install of ipython (planning to fix other
packages when he updates them or when people wish to override them).
Problem solved. Down with setuptools!

David

David