[IronPython] E: Default install location and site-packages

[Dino Viehland]

Michael wrote:
> Well, fair enough [1]. :-)
> 
> Except it may *still* leave distutils / package management basically
> unusable for many people. That would still seem to be bad. I'd like to
> work on making Distribute (the successor to setuptools) compatible with
> IronPython but it is going to require a working distutils system.
> 
> Can PEP 370 style site-packages be made the default for IronPython?
> 
> Michael
> 
> [1] I don't have this problem on the Mac. I have a system installed
> Python that I must sudo to modify and a user installed one that I don't.
> Even a user installed IronPython wouldn't have write permissions in the
> normal site-packages folder on Windows, right?

>From the IronPython side of things I think we should make our installer
have an option to install into a per-user directory.  That is certainly
missing today and would allow us to even have an elevation free installer
(although we couldn't ngen in that case but we might be able to offer the
user an opportunity to ngen even if they do a per-user install if they're
willing to elevate).

Do you have an idea of how to go about making it the default?  It looks
like PEP 370 style site-packages work today - although there might be 
some tweaking we want to do.  It looks like if you create 
%APPDATA%\Python\Python26\site-packages that site.py will pick it up even 
on IronPython.  The only downside to this seems to  be that we share the 
same directory as CPython per-user site packages.  But I'm not sure how
we would make that the default location to install to.

We should probably make the "Python" part of the directory be Python, 
IronPython, Jython, etc... depending upon what implementation you're
running on.