[Pythonmac-SIG] Python 2.7 OSX install issues: site-packages and 32/64-bit

[Andrew Jaffe]

Hi all,

I've been trying to move to Python 2.7 on Max OSX 10.6.4, and a few 
issues have arisen.

The first is a changed location of site-packages and its relation to 
directories for setuptools/easyinstall. In recent versions <=2.6, the 
default site-packages was
        ~/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages
but in 2.7, it seems to have moved to
        ~/Library/Python/2.7/lib/python/site-packages/
This mostly bit me when attempting to use setuptools, which [still] 
advises the following line in ~/.pydistutils.cfg
    install_lib = ~/Library/Python/$py_version_short/site-packages
Is the new location canonical from now on? Should we permanently switch 
to that?

The other issue seems to have to do with 32- vs 64-bit libraries, 
especially in my attempts to install matplotlib. This has bit me with 
wxPython, along with the libpng, zlib, and freetype dependencies (which 
have previously been grabbed from fink but which are 32 bit). Are there 
any magical hints for getting this to work (or binary installers which 
include all of these)?

Yours,

Andrew