Re: [orca-list] Problem with PYTHONPATH and multiple versions of orca

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

I shall try and describe what is happening (or what appears to be
happening).

According to site.py in my /usr/lib/python2.5/ directory you may specify
package path configuration files. These path configuration files are
named in the form <package>.pth and list the paths which should be added
to the python module path. See site.py for full details.

I have setuptools installed and part of it is easy_install. It seems
like any package installed using easy_install adds the packages
directory to easy-install.pth. In this file I found a line
specifying /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages (my standard python module
path). When running python in interactive mode, it appears that the
directories from easy-install.pth were being added before the content of
PYTHONPATH (achieved by examining sys.path).

I believed that PYTHONPATH was always meant to be the first path
searched, but it appears not. I am wondering, I did see in
easy-install.pth some other code other than the paths, if so this may be
something which is causing this behaviour, and in my mind is wrong.

> From reading that bug report you pointed me to it doesn't appear to be
that. I hope the information in this email makes things clear.

Michael Whapples
On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 08:48 -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> I'm not quite sure I understand how this stuff is actually getting in 
> the way.  My understanding is that PYTHONPATH should be considered 
> first.  Is it possible that PYTHONPATH has been defined in your local 
> environment?  The orca script adds itself to the end of the PYTHONPATH 
> environment variable, so if you have PYTHONPATH set up already, it 
> might end up picking up that.  As for why orca adds itself to the end 
> rather than the beginning, see 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491417.   
>
> Will
>
> On Sep 23, 2008, at 7:32 AM, Michael Whapples wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> > I recently noticed that my trunk build of orca was not being used. The
> > trunk build was in a custom location, and I had orca 2.22.3 from my
> > distro installed in the standard place.
> >
> > After some looking, I realised the following: although the correct orca
> > bash script was being run, it was importing from the standard python
> > site-packages directory so using the distro's orca python files. 
> > Further
> > examination of the system revealed that easy_install from setuptools 
> > had
> > added the python site-packages directory to its pth file, so this meant
> > that the standard site-packages directory was searched for modules
> > before the custom orca directory which is specified in the PYTHONPATH
> > environment variable set by the orca script.
> >
> > I have solved this manually by removing the standard site-packages
> > directory from the easy-install.pth file, but the question is what can
> > be done so that orca shouldn't suffer from this again?
> >
> > Should setuptools (or any other package) add the standard site-packages
> > directory to their .pth files (I feel the correct answer but relies on
> > others being correct). Alternatively is there any way orca could ensure
> > that its custom directory is the first on the packages path as this
> > shows that PYTHONPATH can fail to do this.
> >
> > Michael Whapples
> >
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