On Feb 16, 2016, at 11:54 AM, Paul Wise wrote: >I always thought it strange to put site- in /usr/local since >/usr/local already implies site/system-wide packages. Same for dist- >since /usr already implies distribution packages.
For as long as I can remember, a from-source 'configure && make && make install' always put Python in /usr/local by default. I think it was pretty much the defacto standard for non-vendor supplied software[*] back in the days of IRIX, SunOS, and other early *nix OSes that Python was developed on. So it was therefore completely natural that you'd end up with a site-packages in /usr/local. It was only later that the /usr/local site-packages directory ended up on a /usr pathed distro-provided Python, which of course led to the previously discussed dist-packages, the location of which completely mirrors site-packages. >I find it weird that site- gets used in ~/ since they are clearly user >packages not site/system-wide packages. It's all just a big ball of cruft-on-cruft with backward compatibility preventing most cullings. Somewhere out there, the entire world financial system probably still critically depends on a tiny bit of Python 1.3 that nobody has anything but the .pyc files for any more. ;) Cheers, -Barry [*] I can't even call it Free Software or Open Source because it predates those terms. I mean, I started out sharing split shar files on Usenet with my UUCP address. ObGOML.