An environment variable to point to an additional site-packages directory (without disabling the one in Python itself) location would allow having different sets of extra packages that can be enabled by the users in their or shared Python installations.
It'd be helpful in situations where we'd like other teams to maintain their sets of extra packages that could be easily added by just pointing the interpreter to the location of the additional site-packages dir that would fill the rest of the sys.path using the path configuration files if needed.
Right now site.py doesn't seem to allow that and modifying it would mean that the extra packages can be used only with the modified installations of Python.
Using PYTHONPATH is not ideal because it doesn't look for the path configuration files (.pth), thus you can't just point to a single location that would expand itself to the additional paths.
|