[Python-Dev] New functionality in micro releases (was:Documenting branch policy) (original) (raw)

Anthony Baxter anthony at interlink.com.au
Wed Sep 10 02🔞30 EDT 2003

Barry Warsaw wrote This does point out a problem with the batteries-included philosophy though: it's hard to upgrade packages that come with Python. Say we release email 3.0 and you want to use it in Python 2.3, what do you do? You can't just do a distutils install, because site-packages is searched after the standard library. I think we need more flexibility in installing distutils packages, so we can install in various locations that override standard packages (e.g. user-centric, system-centric, etc.).

The approach taken by the XML add-on package doesn't seem to be the right approach, either. At the moment your choices are to manually install the new code over the old, or else have a separate install area that's manually added to the start of the PYTHONPATH (this is what mailman does, right?) Neither of these approaches seem ideal. The latter is what I do for various systems that need newer versions of packages that are bundled with python, it'd be nice if there was a better way - but I can't see one.

Anthony

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