Barry Warsaw wrote:
It also makes Debian the odd man out. Instructions we publish for every other *nix have to have a caveat or FAQ for Debian's (and derivatives) difference. These can go unnoticed until things break, and then we can get difficult to debug problem reports. An experienced helper will be conditioned to first ask "Are you on Debian or Ubuntu? Well, you have to do things differently there."
This is a point of perspective. From my point of view python is the odd one out: every other tool and compiler seems to look in both /usr/local and /usr *except* for (non-Debian) python. That would be highly confusing for me, and I fail to understand why python made that choice.
Debian has always setup /usr/local so that anyone in the staff group can write to it. This is very convenient: it gives you a clear point of demarkation between OS-managed applications, which install in /usr, and manually managed applications which install in /usr/local and can be installed by trusted non-root users. I don't know why your Ubuntu system only makes /usr/local writable for root, to me that sounds like a bug in Ubuntu.
I find virtualenv to be a better tool to setup local python environments: it does not require people to recompile all of python while still providing a clean environment to work in. And as far as I can see it is a good solution for almost all use cases where you currently tell people to compile a local python version.
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