Environmental variable $PYTHONPATH

[cestluk]

Please excuse me if this rather dumb question has been answered before. It 
does not seem to be in the FAQ, though.

It seems that each time you add a new library/module to your current python 
installation, you have to make it known to python manually, for example, by 
editing $PYTHONPATH or including it in the search path by invoking sys.path(). 
I am using the W32 version of python 1.6 and the sys.path output looks 
something like

'', 'C\\Python16\\win32', 'C\\Python16\\win32\\lib', 'C\\Python16', 
'C\\Python16\\Pythonwin', 'C\\PYTHON16\\DLLs', 'C\\PYTHON16\\lib', 
'C\\PYTHON16\\lib\\plat-win', 'C\\PYTHON16\\lib\\lib-tk', 
'C\\PYTHON16\\PYTHONWIN', 'C\\PYTHON16']

It seems you have to specify the name of _every_ directory and subdirectory. 
Doing this manually would be quite tedious if you have a lot of modules to 
install. Is there a simpler/less manual way to do it?

I am thinking of the case of TeX (in tetex) where the system installation is 
under a certain texmf tree and the user's own packages are under another and 
running kpathsea will set up the search path for the packages.

Regards,
ST
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