[Python-Dev] [Distutils] PEP 376 - from PyPM's point of view

[Joachim König]

Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> So basically "site-packages" is a distribution location that is
> avoided by everyone because it doesn't
> know how to handle multiple versions. 
I think you overrate the importance of having multiple versions of a 
package available
for the same python interpreter. If you have m different versions of n 
packages then
you could have n**m different combinations for an application so you need a
possiblilty to select one combination from n**m possible ones at application
startup time. Is this really worth it?

> If we had a multi-versions
> support protocol, that would
> help os packagers and application developers to be friends again imho ;)
>   
> Let's remove site-packages from Python then.
The _one_ site-packages folder stands for _one_ python interpreter. All 
the clever
efforts to provide a set of package versions at runtime to an 
application (that uses
the singleton python interpreter) do logically create a new python 
interpreter with
a site-packages folder that contains just the versions of the packages 
the application
needs, unfortunately by mucking with PYTHONPATH and <package>.pth, 
site.py etc
making it very difficult to understand what is happening for the joe 
average python developer.