[Python-Dev] Remove site-packages?!? [was: [Distutils] PEP 376 - from pythonpkgmgr's point of view]

[M.-A. Lemburg]

James Y Knight wrote:
> 
> On Jul 22, 2009, at 4:49 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> 
>> Debian has a long history of doing this different, so it's
>> not much of a surprise. They also apply such changes to
>> Python packages.
>>
>> However, all of this is non-standard and will cause problems
>> with tools that rely on the standard site-packages/ location. Such
>> changes should be discouraged.
> 
> And yet, the change seems to have some strong reasoning, solves the
> problem discussed in this thread, and was apparently discussed and
> approved of by some core python developers before being implemented. It
> seems a bit foolish to me to thus just dismiss it as "evil debian being
> different"...

Maybe I've misunderstood some important detail, but how will
their "change" help with anything other than making their
distribution a non-standard Python installation ?

distutils allows for a great deal of flexibility. For some
reason, this does not appear to be known to a larger
audience.

I can only recommend reading Greg's great write-up about the
end-user perspective of installing Python modules:

    http://docs.python.org/install/

A little known fact is that distutils can easily be customized
using config files:

    http://docs.python.org/install/#distutils-configuration-files

Together with the PYTHONHOME and PYTHONPATH environment
variables setup in your .bashrc, this gives you full flexibility
regarding the Python package setup and permits setting up
private Python installations, parallel Python installations,
Python installations sharing packages, etc. etc.

It really depends a lot on what you want to achieve. There's
no one fits all configuration.

Using a non-standard Python installation as system Python is
certainly not a good approach to solving anything. It only
makes it harder for users having to fight problems arising
out of this.

You have the same problem in other areas as well. A prominent
example being Microsoft's tendency (in the past) to tweak standards
to better meet their requirements.

> If anything it seems like it's a failure of the Python project to make
> easily deployable software, compounded with a failure of communication
> within the python community.

I lost you there.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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