ubuntu dist-packages

[Robin Becker]

I was surprised a couple of days ago when trying to assist a colleage with his 
python setup on a ubuntu 9.04 system.

We built our c-extensions and manually copied them into place, but site-packages 
wasn't there. It seems that ubuntu now wants stuff to go into 
lib/python2.6/dist-packages.

What is the relation between dist-packages/site-packages if any? Is this just a 
name change or is there some other problem being addressed?

For developers is it best just to create one's own private installations from 
the original tarballs?
-- 
Robin Becker