From the docs@ list:
"""
Dear all,

the first paragraph of the documentation for the site module states that site.py constructs four directories using a head and tail part, and that

one of the tail parts would be lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages on UNIX/Mac.

However, in my Python 3.2 installation on Ubuntu 12.04 this is actually lib/python3/dist-packages (so no .Y and a different subdirectory) !

This is also stated in the module’s doc string.

I don’t know why the Python documentation says something else, but that should be fixed.
"""

Attached a patch to explain why the defaults may look different on some distributions.  Please review.

the local patch adds as documentation on Debian/Ubuntu:

"""
For Debian and derivatives, this sys.path is augmented with directories
for packages distributed within the distribution. Local addons go
into /usr/local/lib/python<version>/dist-packages, Debian addons
install into /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages.
/usr/lib/python<version>/site-packages is not used.
"""

I can improve the local information, but I'm not sure how much should be added/changed in the upstream documentation.

So maybe we should add an option for python-config to get the site dirs, or the list of site dirs too?

Matthias and I agreed this isn't necessary since on the relevant distribution it's already documented.