catching up

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray via devel <devel at ntpsec.org>:
> Eric:
>   I don't understand the python finding libraries area.  It seems reasonable 
> to ask hackers and developers to add a PYTHONPATH to their environment.  It 
> seems non-good to me to ask every sysadmin to hack their root environment.

I ruefully agree.  Unfortunately, this is an ara where distribution
packagers have a rather inexplicable tendeny to fall down.  I don't
really know why such flakiness is widespread, but from the
pattern of errors I think a failure by the Python maintainers to
provide strong best-practice guidelines might be contributing to the
problem.

I never see this sort of problem on Ubuntu, so there is at least one
demonstration that this tangle can be avoided.

>   Is there any reasonable way to "fix" that?  If nothing else, we can hack 
> the install recipe to edit the scripts on the fly so they look where the 
> libraries get installed.

Alas, that's not as easy as you probably think it is.  I have brushed
up against this problems in the past; I predict that another difficult
dive into waf's rather opaque documentation is in my future.
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