On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Tres Seaver<tsea...@palladion.com> wrote: > You missed my point: I know that sys.prefix etc. is set based on the > location of the executable. You were complaining that setuptools / > distutils wants to put files in an "OS-controlled directory": I was > asking how Python was supposed to know the difference between > /usr/lib/python2.x/site-packages (presumably "OS-controlled") and > /opt/Python2.x/lib/python2.x/site-packages (definitely not "OS-controlled").
autoconf--for all its warts--solved this ages ago. On installation, you specify what prefix you want to install stuff into; if you don't, you get a sensible default (/usr/local). If you're creating an OS package, or if installing directly into /usr is otherwise really what you really want to do, you specify --prefix=/usr. The Python core doesn't need to know anything about this; it just needs to have a sys.path that includes both /usr/lib/... and /usr/local/lib/.... This works for everything else--C headers, libraries, manpages, shared libraries. Why is Python special? > The solution is to avoid doing distutils / setuptools operations as > root, *ever*, and instead use either an alternate install location (such > as /opt/Python2.x) or use something like virtualenv, which provides a > "safe" sandbox for installing stuff. This is nasty. I should certainly be able to globally install packages on my own, without creating a whole new Python installation or other hacks, just like I can install anything else into /usr/local. -- Glenn Maynard _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
