Comment 6 for bug 219489

I *did* find this document for 'setuptools':
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#custom-installation-locations

Basically, it *always* requires some level of additional configuration on the part of the user.

You can do the "Admin Install"
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#administrator-installation

Which requires you to add
import sys; sys.addsitedir('path/to/lib/python')

Which is pretty much the same as setting PYTHONPATH (except it also handles .pth files).

There is also "Virtual Installation":
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#creating-a-virtual-python

Which involves downloading another script. When you run it, it basically copies the python executable into a custom location, so that when it starts up, it uses a different default search path (which is customized to each install directory.)

So I'm tending to mark this as either a bug in upstream, or just WontFix for now, as it is just a limitation of setup tools (disutils/setuptools) and I don't think we are going to be reimplementing them.