On 03/30/2011 11:23 PM, P.J. Eby wrote: > At 01:35 PM 3/30/2011 -0400, Carl Meyer wrote: >> So... it seems to me that we're likely to break _some_ third-party code >> using sys.prefix regardless of what we do here. My instinct says adding >> sys.virtual_prefix and leaving sys.prefix alone is the better approach, >> but I'm not very firmly entrenched in that position. > > Looking at it from a software distribution POV, I would say that the > virtual prefix is what it should point to, since that means things won't > get installed to the wrong place.
Indeed. The issue is that from every point of view other than software distribution (code trying to find anything other than site-directories), sys.prefix pointing to the virtualenv is wrong. Unless, like virtualenv, we try to make it "just right enough" by copying/symlinking things into the virtualenv that otherwise wouldn't need to be there. But this may be moot; I didn't realize until I checked just now that setuptools (well, easy_install) builds its own list of site-dirs based on sys.prefix. It doesn't look like that's used for installation, but it is used for pre-flight checking pth-capability and finding pth files. So if easy_install directly relies on site-directories always being sys.prefix-based, that probably forces the issue. > (Of course, a configuration option could be used to override it, if > really necessary.) This seems like the worst option of all - then third-party code really would have no idea at all what sys.prefix is supposed to mean, or what can be reliably found there. Carl _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
