Are you a Python developer? And do you have tons of libraries installed somewhere into a non-standard prefix? Since I started coding in Python again, I wanted to avoid installing libraries globally so that I could easily manage them. So I now install everything with a –prefix=~/.python . Distutils setup.py makes this very easy since all you have to do is append this option to the python setup.py install call and change the PYTHONPATH environment variable accordingly.
But distutils has something that makes this procedure even easier: If you’re tired of typing –prefix=whatever again and again you can also set a default value for each user. If you’re under MacOSX/Linux/Unix/blob create $HOME/.pydistutils.conf and add following lines:
[install] prefix=~/.python
With this file you can basically pre-set each option the setup.py offers for each of its command. Very handy :D
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