Dear all, I was reading pep 370, "Per user site-packages directory" http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0370/, and was wondering if the concept couldn't be generalized by having ways to pass a .pth file as commandline argument and/or via an environment variable (PYTHONPATH could also be used to feed .pth files) and/or via special named files such as ~/.python2.6-user.pth or ./python2.6-local.pth, or possibly even reusing the paths in the distutils configuration files (under [install]).
Any path in the above files would be added to sys.path and scanned recursively for other pth files. The system would also load default.pth from a pre-defined location (e.g. /etc/python2.6/ default.pth), which would point to the default site-packages directory. There should also be a mechanism to disable/override default.pth for situations where a clean environment is desired. This would make it easier to setup special testing environments, perform local installations, and allow for file-based deployments (in simple scenarios), without resorting to special tools such as virtual- python, editing site.py and/or requiring sysadmin intervention. It would be particularly useful in environments where there is a clear separation between IT and developer roles. I just started giving some thoughts to the concept and I am not fully aware of the implications and requirements of the proposal, but even if the above turns out to be impractical, I hope that a debate on the topic will be beneficial. Ago -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list