Issue 5071: Distutils should not fail if install dir is not in PYTHONPATH (original) (raw)

At present, distutils exits with an error return code if the directory that modules are being installed into is not in PYTHONPATH. Since the install path is not easily obtained (it at least requires running Python to work out the version string, plus some guesswork about "lib" vs. "lib64", etc. etc.), it would be nice if this was not a blocking problem... at least when the --force flag is passed to setup.py

(PS. It would be nice if there is a way to get the installation path from distutils before installing, for the reasons mentioned: that way automatic install scripts like the one I'm managing could work out the path, make it and add it to the PYTHONPATH, without worrying about getting it wrong. Am I just missing something that already exists?)