Thinkhole Labs

Ian Bicking has some interesting thoughts about installing Python packages in the system’s site-packages directory.

Quoth Ian:

For everything else site-packages is just a mess. What happens when you upgrade a library there? Who knows… maybe nothing (if there’s another package earlier on the path that covers up the package in site-packages). Or maybe several packages will now need upgrades, as they depended on an interface that has now changed. Or maybe the system is just broken, because upgrades aren’t available for everything that depended on the library.

Read the whole thing.

I’ve wondered the same thing because most Linux package managers (Portage in my case) install Python libraries to the site-packages directory. Useful on a single user system, but it could be quite a mess indeed on a multiuser system. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this.