[Python-Dev] PEP: per user site-packages directory (original) (raw)

Steve Holden steve at holdenweb.com
Mon Jan 21 15:16:46 CET 2008

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Right now Python faces a lot of problems in the webhosting world because it's tedious to set up and maintain for the webhosting user since they often have to compile and install their own Python in their home directory. I don't understand why they have to do that. I can believe they do that as they don't know better - but why can't they use the Python interpreter already available on the system, and just install additional packages in their home directory? One possible reason is that the hosting vendor doesn't provide a sufficiently up-to-date Python release for certain site requirements.

I think this is extremely important due to the proliferation of Python now more and more as a choice for webapp development. For that, I think the requirements need to be much more explicit. True. But IMHO Python is still seen as a "difficult" language to package. We haven't reached CPAN levels of ease-of-use ye. Yes, I do know that CPAN isn't perfect, and I think easy_install is a great boon to Python users, but CPAN does a great job 98% of the time.

Maybe once we get easy_install as a part of the core (so there's no need to find and run ez_setup.py to start with) things will start to improve. This is an issue the whole developer community needs to take seriously if we are interested in increasing take-up.

regards Steve

Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/

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