[Python-Dev] how GNU stow is complementary rather than alternative to distutils

[Giuseppe Ottaviano]

Talking of stow, I take advantage of this thread to do some shameless  
advertising :)
Recently I uploaded to PyPI a software of mine, BPT [1], which does  
the same symlinking trick of stow, but it is written in Python (and  
with a simple api) and, more importantly, it allows with another trick  
the relocation of the installation directory (it creates a semi- 
isolated environment, similar to virtualenv).
I find it very convenient when I have to switch between several  
versions of the same packages (for example during development), or I  
have to deploy on the same machine software that needs different  
versions of the dependencies.

I am planning to write an integration layer with buildout and  
easy_install. It should be very easy, since BPT can handle directly  
tarballs (and directories, in trunk) which contain a setup.py.

HTH,
Giuseppe

[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bpt
P.S. I was not aware of stow, I'll add it to the references and see if  
there are any features that I can steal