Dear all, These days I often find myself using working-env.py, virtual-python.py & co. The main reason in most cases is to insulate my working environment so that I can use custom site-package libs together with the default stdlib. PYTHONHOME and/or PYTHONPATH (particularly with python -S) get close, but not quite there, and the above scripts seem a bit over the top.
Wouldn't it be possible to support a PYTHONSITEDIR environment variable in site.py for this purpose? I have attached a possible patch. In what follows, if PYTHONSITEDIR is defined, that dir is used as the only source of site-packages, extra paths can easily be added by creating a .pth file in there. A different variable could be used to prepend a sitedir to the list of default sitedirs (similar code without "return None"). --- /usr/lib/python2.5/site.py 2008-05-29 22:03:04.000000000 +0100 +++ /tmp/site.py 2008-09-09 18:06:42.000000000 +0100 @@ -167,6 +167,10 @@ def addsitepackages(known_paths): """Add site-packages (and possibly site-python) to sys.path""" + sitedir = os.environ.get('PYTHONSITEDIR') + if sitedir and os.path.isdir(sitedir): + addsitedir(sitedir, known_paths) + return None prefixes = [sys.prefix] if sys.exec_prefix != sys.prefix: prefixes.append(sys.exec_prefix) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list