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

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Tue Jan 22 18:24:20 CET 2008

At 04:42 PM 1/22/2008 +0100, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

I don't really understand what all this has to do with per user site-packages.

Note that the motivation for having per user site-packages was to: * address a common request by Python extension package users, * get rid off the hackery done by setuptools in order to provide this.

Setuptools doesn't do any hackery for per-user site-packages, although its documentation does explain how to set up such a thing if you want it:

http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#administrator-installation http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#mac-os-x-user-installation

Meanwhile, note that having per-user site-packages directories doesn't eliminate the need to be able to have PYTHONPATH directories treated as "site" directories, which is hasn't been discussed at all.

As such the PEP can also be seen as an effort to enable code cleanup before adding e.g. pkgresources to the stdlib.

Code cleanup of what? There's nothing in pkg_resources that would change for per-user site package directories, since pkg_resources doesn't do any installation work.

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