[Python-Dev] Python and the Linux Standard Base (LSB) (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Tue Nov 28 22:19:47 CET 2006

At 01:05 PM 11/28/2006 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On 11/28/06, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote: > There's a related issue that may or may not be in scope for this > thread. For distros like Gentoo or Ubuntu that rely heavily on their > own system Python for the OS to work properly, I'm quite loathe to > install Cheeseshop packages into the system site-packages.

I wonder if would help if we were to add a vendor-packages directory where distros can put their own selection of 3rd party stuff they depend on, to be searched before site-packages, and a command-line switch that ignores site-package but still searches vendor-package. (-S would almost do it but probably suppresses too much.)

They could also use -S and then explicitly insert the vendor-packages directory into sys.path at the beginning of their scripts. And a .pth in site-packages could add vendor-packages at the end of sys.path, so that scripts not using -S would pick it up.

This would be backward compatible except for the vendor scripts that want to use this approach.

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