[Distutils] RE: [Python-Dev] PEP 250 - site-packages on Windows: (Was: [Distutils] Package DB: strawman PEP)

[Thomas Heller]

[I've cut down the To: and CC: headers to olny include python-dev
and distutils]
> Well, site.py could be modified to set a symbol in the sys module
> which could then be queried by distutils, e.g. sys.extinstallprefix.
> 
> Alternatively, distutils could be made to default to 
> Lib\site-packages and then revert to Lib\ in case this directory
> is not available.
> 
> BTW, I don't think that using Windows registry keys for determining the
> installation path is a good idea -- this information should be kept
> in the site.py or sitecustomize.py module for easy editing.

The problem is that the 'installation path' information must be
loaded at run time by the windows installer, and it may not always
sucessful to embed python at run time and let python code retrieve it.
Remember the problems we had with Python2.0 on win95/98, when win32all
was not installed? The installer was not able to compile the installed
files to pyc/pyo because of this path bug.

Anyway, how does bdist-rpm does it? Should be the same problem
there...

Thomas