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

[David Lyon]

On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:22:56 +0200, "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> 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 ?

The Debian/ubuntu distribution isn't non-standard. If anything
I'd prefer to suggest that it is in many ways "a standard"

Here's a sys.pth from a mac...

['', 
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python26.zip', 
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6', 
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/plat-darwin',

'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/plat-mac',

'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages',

'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/lib-tk', 
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/lib-old', 
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/lib-dynload',

'/Users/david/.local/lib/python2.6/site-packages', 
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages']

You can see that there are many choices along sys.path for installing
packages.

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

People forget command lines - that's why.

> I can only recommend reading Greg's great write-up about the
> end-user perspective of installing Python modules:
> 
>     http://docs.python.org/install/

It's good documentation of course. Cheers to Greg but the
old method is so tedious. That really is the hard way.

pythonpkgmgr offers a much easier solution by wrapping
easy_install and/or pip. You just type in parts of the
package name into a search box, click [search], a search
of pypi is done, click [install] and your package is
downloaded and installed.

It's a much more modern way of doing package installation
and requires absolutely no typing on a command line.

> A little known fact is that distutils can easily be customized
> using config files:
> 
>     http://docs.python.org/install/#distutils-configuration-files

Perphaps.

But it seems only for advanced users.. and I couldn't figure
out on the face of it what advantage it would have.

Take care

David