ubuntu dist-packages

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Robin Becker wrote:

> 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?

I don't know much about the atrocities distributions commit to
python-installations (ripping out distutils "because it's a developer-only
thing", trying to save a few bytes here and there by unifying
install-locations between interpreter versions and whatnot), but I think
the main problem is that you don't use distutils - or setuptools (that gets
often a bad rap even if for most cases it works flawless)

If you'd use that to build & install your extension, it would figure out
where to place the resulting package (or egg) by itself. 

Diez