.pth in current directory: Why doesn't it work as the documentation says?

[David Lyon]

On Mon, 18 May 2009 14:05:50 +0100, Tim Golden <mail at timgolden.me.uk>
wrote:

> According to http://docs.python.org/install/index.html and my
> own reasonably long experience of them, they're just a way of
> getting extra paths into sys.path. ....

Well, fair enough... 

> The docs referred to above do indeed say "add a path configuration 
> file to a directory that’s already on Python’s path" but until I
> saw Christian H's post just now, I'd never bothered to understand
> exactly what the mechanism was: I just stick site.pth into c:\pythonxx
> and it works for me.

Sure. Only I have been debugging the code lately to try to understand
how to do package installation/deinstallation for a python package 
manager. Perphaps my understunding is simplistic.

I think the area of confusion here is the word "directory". I suggest
that perphaps the term "package" is more modern.

For example, "a .PTH file in a sys.path directory contains links to all 
the packages available to python" is perphaps is clearer than :

"a .PTH file in a sys.path directory contains links to all the 
directories available to python"

Everybody knows your experience goes back a lot further than mine.

So you're probably in a much better position to explain it than me.

Good - I can go back to my code now...

:-)

David