Understanding .pth in site-packages

[Peter Otten]

Josh English wrote:

> I have a development version of a library in c:\dev\XmlDB\xmldb
> 
> After testing the setup script I also have
> c:\python27\lib\site-packages\xmldb
> 
> Now I'm continuing to develop it and simultaneously building an
> application with it.
> 
> I thought I could plug into my site-packages directory a file called
> xmldb.pth with:
> 
> c:\dev\XmlDB\xmldb
> 
> which should redirect import statements to the development version of the
> library.
> 
> This doesn't seem to work.

You have to put the directory containing the package into the pth-file. 
That's probably

c:\dev\XmlDB

in your case. Also, Python will stop at the first matching module or 
package; if you keep c:\python27\lib\site-packages\xmldb that will shadow 
c:\dev\XmlDB\xmldb.

%APPDATA%/Python/Python26/site-packages

may be a good place for the pth-file (I'm not on Windows and too lazy to 
figure out where %APPDATA% actually is. The PEP 
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0370/ may help)