Resolution of the library-path mess

[Fred Wright]

On Sun, 1 Oct 2017, Eric S. Raymond via devel wrote:

> Gary E. Miller via devel <devel at ntpsec.org>:
> > How do you plan that a local NTPsec install from source does not
> > overwite an NTPsec install from the native OS repositories?
>
> That now will never happen if the /usr/local/lb/python-X.Y directory exists;
> the install logic will notice that.

That of course assumes that if the directory exists, it's in sys.path.
Perhaps that's a reasonable assumption, though it's hard to be sure.

> I'll add language to INSTALL that one should make sure this directory
> exists so as not to step on any distribution copy of the ntp library.

Looking at:

+Thw function get_python_lib() in the Python distutils library is the
+only reliable way to know where in fact the ntp Python librarty can
+installed; it normally returns sometyhing under /usr/lib.

Aside from the typos, the last statement only seems to be true of Linux;
*BSD returns something under /usr/local/lib, and OSX uses something
totally different.  So get_python_lib() has no FHS issues outside Linux.

Note that both the original and updated versions of massage() replace
BSD's /usr/local/lib with /usr/local/local/lib, which is certainly
undesirable, though I suppose the existence test will probably fail on the
result.  It might be better to test for /usr/<not local>/ before munging
anything.

Fred Wright