[Python-Dev] request for comments - standardization of python's purelib and platlib (original) (raw)

Tarek Ziadé ziade.tarek at gmail.com
Fri Aug 14 10:02:03 CEST 2009

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Brett Cannon<brett at python.org> wrote:

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 11:23, Jan Matejek <jan.matejek at novell.com> wrote:

Hello, I'm cross-posting this to distributions at freedesktop and python-dev, because the topic is relevant to both groups and should be solved in cooperation. The issue: In Python's default configuration (on linux), both purelib (location for pure python modules) and platlib (location for platform-dependent binary extensions) point to $prefix/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages. That is no good for two main reasons. One, python depends on the "lib" directory. (from distro's point of view, prefix is /usr, so let's talk /usr/lib) Due to this, it's impossible to install python under /usr/lib64 without heavy patching. Repeated attempts to bring python developers to acknowledge and rectify the situation have all failed (common argument here is "that would mean redesign of distutils and huge parts of whatnot"). This is now Tarek's call, so this may or may not have changed in terms of what the (now) distutils maintainer thinks.

I don't recall those repeated attempts , but I've been around for less than two years.

You are very welcome to come in the Distutils-SIG ML to discuss these matters. I'm moving the discussion there.

Among the proposals you have detailed, the sharedir way seems like the most simple/interesting one (depending on you answer to Brett's question )

Regards Tarek

-- Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org

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