… accidentally I stumbled about something I really wished for. User-specific site-packages (python-talk). As specified in “PEP 370 — Per user site-packages directory” a user’s home directory might now have a directory called .local which contains lib/python<version>/site-packages and also bin/.
For this sweetness of course no python PEP is needed, but here comes the beauty:
~/.local is kind of a new standard directory which is a “standard” suggested by freedesktop.org and already used by some other applications and
python ./setup.py install –user
will automatically install the required package there – which again is no big thing and could be archived via PREFIX=~/.local/ but this is feels natural, pythonic, good. All now left to do is to add ~/.local/bin to the PATH-variable and ~/.local/lib/python<version>/site-packages/ to the PYTHONPATH (you should imo do this in ~/.profile).
So, using this, your virtualenv-usage might significantly decrease (though it does not make virtual environments useless).
