On 21 June 2012 12:48, Chris McDonough <chr...@plope.com> wrote: > On 06/21/2012 04:45 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote: > >> On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Chris McDonough<chr...@plope.com> >> wrote: >> >>> All of these are really pretty minor issues compared with the main >>> benefit >>> of not needing to ship everything with everything else. The killer >>> feature >>> is that developers can specify dependencies and users can have those >>> dependencies installed automatically in a cross-platform way. Everything >>> else is complete noise if this use case is not served. >>> >> >> Cool. This is the kind of thing we need recorded in a PEP - there's a >> lot of domain knowledge floating around in the heads of packaging >> folks that needs to be captured so we can know *what the addition of >> packaging to the standard library is intended to fix*. >> >> And, like it or not, setuptools has a serious PR problem due to the >> fact it monkeypatches the standard library, uses *.pth files to alter >> sys.path for every installed application by default, actually *uses* >> the ability to run code in *.pth files and has hard to follow >> documentation to boot. I *don't* trust that I fully understand the >> import system on any machine with setuptools installed, because it is >> demonstrably happy to install state to the file system that will >> affect *all* Python programs running on the machine. >> > > I don't know about Red Hat but both Ubuntu and Apple put all kinds of > stuff on the default sys.path of the system Python of the box that's > related to their software's concerns only. I don't understand why people > accept this but get crazy about the fact that installing a setuptools > distribution using easy_install changes the default sys.path. >
I don't like the particular way that easy_install modifies sys.path so that it can no longer be overridden by PYTHONPATH. For a discussion, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5984523/eggs-in-path-before-pythonpath-environment-variable The fact that ubuntu does this for some system ubuntu packages has never bothered me, but the fact that it happens for packages that I install with easy_install has. The typical scenario would be that I: 1) Install some package X with easy_install. 2) Find a bug or some aspect of X that I want to change and checkout the latest version from e.g. github. 3) Try to use PYTHONPATH to test the checked out version and find that easy_install's path modification prevents me from doing so. 4) Run the quickfix script in the stackoverflow question above and consider not using easy_install for X in future. Oscar
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