FYI, I just checked in some additional target directory checks for easy_install, based on an idea inspired by a comment from Exarkun on my blog. It seems that a lot of the most recent "new" problems reported with setuptools have to do with site-packages directories under secondary prefixes, like Debian's /usr/local or various 64-bit distros' /usr/lib64. EasyInstall hasn't previously been able to detect that these are valid "site" directories, leading to unnecessary pain for users of these platforms.
So, the latest SVN version now contains logic to verify the "site"-ishness of the installation directory, via the crude (but effective) expedient of writing a .pth file to the directory and spawning another Python process to see if the .pth file actually gets processed. This should almost completely eliminate the need for --site-dirs, and along with it, the need to actually read the installation instructions. :) In fact, the only time now that somebody should care about the "custom installation location" docs is if they want to set up a custom "site" directory and *not* use PYTHONPATH to do it. In addition to this new empirical test for site-ness, I've also added writability and existence checks, with hopefully-useful error messages. So we should now be a lot closer to a place where package developers can feel safe using ez_setup as part of their installation process, even if they're very particular about the user experience on a wide variety of platforms. However, testing is appreciated, as always. I'm particularly interested in whether this version can correctly deal with installation targets like /usr/lib64 and Debian's /usr/local/python2.x/site-packages directories, *without* needing to specify site-dirs on the command line or in a config file. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
