On 05.05.2021 10:01, Christian Heimes wrote:
> 
>> "as root" imply that there's no user site-packages directory at all
>                                  ^^^^^      
> 
> Steve is talking about user site-packages, not global site-packages directory.

You mean "pip install --user" as root ? That's not how you typically
install Python packages as root in a Dockerfile, no, but, of course,
even as root, there is the possibility to install into /root/.local/.

The typical Unix way of installing non-system packages is either
into /usr/local, /opt/local or similar variants, not into /usr.
Python itself also defaults to /usr/local when running
"make install". System provided packages normally live
under /usr (or even directly under / for low level tools).

As a root user, I'd assume that "pip install" also installs into
a /usr/local based site-packages dir -- and that's what happens
at least on Debian based OSes. But it can only happen because
the distros patch the install scheme, since this would normally
install into the /usr based site-packages dir for a python binary
living in /usr/bin.