Hi Floris, That's exactly how I see it and i totally agree.
My contribution is to make a Package Manager Gui that tries to be supportive of what you describe so well. If i have any complaint about the state of affairs it would only be that it takes a newcomer such a long time (months) to fully understand what should be a 5 minute thing as you so well describe below. > On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 07:08:26PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote: >> On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 5:22 PM, M.-A. Lemburg<m...@egenix.com> wrote: >> > Maybe I've misunderstood some important detail, but how will >> > their "change" help with anything other than making their >> > distribution a non-standard Python installation ? >> >> I think I'm a little confused, too, because Python supports the >> /usr|/usr/local separation just fine (setup.py install >> --prefix=/usr/local). >> >> It seems like it's also using "dist-packages" instead of >> "site-packages". That part, I don't understand at all--distribution >> packages should go in /usr/lib/pythonx.y/site-packages, and "site" >> packages go in /usr/local/pythonx.y/site-packages; /usr/local *itself* >> means "non-distribution site-installed stuff". If that's what you're >> referring to, then at least on first impression I agree. > > The way Debian does this isn't that stupid. It solves the problem of > the sysadmin intalling Python distibutions for the system Python > without writing in the system locations, which is a very reasonable > thing to do. > > Before Debian used dist-packages, > /usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages was added to the sys.path of > the system Python and this was the location where a sysadmin should > add packages (although distutils did not default to that location, so > it wasn so it was still easy to mess up the system package > management). But this caused trouble for people who installed their > own Python in /usr/local since now you have the same > /usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages shared by 2 interpreters. > > To solve this the system python moved to dist-packages instead, this > allows the local admin location to use > /usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/dist-packages which does not conflict with > locally installed interpreters. Together with this they changed > distutils to install to /usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/dist-packages by > default, so that a sysadmin would have to go out of their way to mess > up the system package management. > > This is a pretty neat solution to the problem. But the weird thing > (IMHO) is that distutils-sig completely refuses to see this > requirement. Generally it seems accepted that installing modules in > the system location (/usr/) is a bad thing, but last time it got > discussed there was a point blank refusal to accept that the local > admin needs a location in to install packages in. I think it would be > great if Python instead provided a general guideline or best practice > for this situation which would be explained in the documentation. > > > Regards > Floris > > > -- > Debian GNU/Linux -- The Power of Freedom > www.debian.org | www.gnu.org | www.kernel.org > _______________________________________________ > 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/david.lyon%40preisshare.net > _______________________________________________ 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
