[Python-Dev] Proposing PEP 376 (original) (raw)

Tarek Ziadé ziade.tarek at gmail.com
Wed Apr 7 16:01:35 CEST 2010

2010/4/2 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>: [...]

* Paths under the base installation location are relative to the base * Paths not under the base installation location, but under the installation prefix, are also stored relative to the base, IF the base location is a subpath of the installation prefix * All other paths are absolute. Where "base location" is the effective --install-lib directory, and prefix is the effective --prefix.  (Which default of course to site-package and sys.prefix respectively, but the spec shouldn't be in terms of those defaults.)

Just to make sure we agree on this:

we use relative path if the file is in site-packages, or somewhere under sys.prefix. For the latter this is only if site-packages is under sys.prefix.

Examples under debian:

docutils/__init__.py          ->     located in

/usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/ ../../../bin/rst2html.py -> located in /usr/local/bin /etc/whatever -> located in /etc

So, everything under /usr/local (sys.prefix) is relative to /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages. Other paths are absolute.

In case the site-packages directory was not under sys.prefix, we would use an absolute path for files under sys.prefix but not in site-packages. (like rst2html.py)

Regards Tarek

Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org

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