Comment 42 for bug 254035

So let's summarize what we know of this issue. It occurs with all packages that are installed by python-support, right? And the underlying cause is that python-support is installing the package's .egg-info into a directory which may or may not be on the sys.path but which is not a "site-dir". Apparently there is a list of site-dirs, and if your .egg-info is not in a directory on that list then you can experience this bug. The maintainers of setuptools therefore suggested in [1] that if Debian/Ubuntu is going to be installing Python libraries into a directory $SOMEDIR, then they should also configure the system-wide distutils config file to add:

[easy_install]
site_dirs = $SOMEDIR

However, Matthias Klose says in [2] that he does not think that /var/lib/python-support/python$VER should be added to the site-dirs and instead that the maintainers of python-support should change the way it behaves so that Python libraries get installed into the sys.path instead.

What do the maintainers of python-support say? Are they even aware of this request? Would it be okay, oh maintainers of python-support, if we changed python-support to install Python libraries into the sys.path, as Matthias Klose suggested? Or if not, is there another way that we can fix this bug?

Thanks, folks.

[1] http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/msg402
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=475440#40