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From: Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2011 10:32:23 -0600
Subject: Re: Understanding .pth files
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On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Josh English
<Joshua.R.English@gmail.com> wrote:
> According to the docs, I should be able to put a file in the site-package=
s directory called xmldb.pth pointing anywhere else on my drive to include =
the package. I'd like to use this to direct Python to include the version i=
n the dev folder and not the site-packages folder.

The name of the .pth file is not important.  Python uses it to add
locations to sys.path; it doesn't care what packages might be
contained at those locations.

> So my C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xmldb.pth file has one line:
>
> c:\dev\XmlDB\xmldb

The final xmldb is the actual package, yes?  The directory in the .pth
file should be one inside which Python can find packages, not a
package itself.  So the file should have just "c:\dev\XmlDB".  Then
when you do "import xmldb", Python will look inside the
"c:\dev\XmlDB", find the xmldb package, and import it.

>
> (I've tried the slashes the other way, too, but it doesn't seem to work).
>
> Is the only solution to delete the installed library and add the dev fold=
er to my site.py file?

The preferred solution here is to use virtualenv to set up your
development environment without having to modify the installed version
in the system site-packages at all.

HTH,
Ian