Eggs in path before PYTHONPATH environment variable

Question

If I have packages installed from easy_install, the eggs are prepended to sys.path before the items in the PYTHONPATH variable.

Fo

Answer 1

Unfortunately this is done with a hard-coded template deep inside setuptools/command/easy_install.py. You could create a patched setuptools with an edited template, but I've found no clean way to extend easy_install from the outside.

Each time easy_install runs it will regenerate the file easy_install.pth. Here is a quick script which you can run after easy_install, to remove the header and footer from easy_install.pth. You could create a wrapper shell script to run this immediately after easy_install:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
path = sys.argv[1]
lines = open(path, 'rb').readlines()
if lines and 'import sys' in lines[0]:
    open(path, 'wb').write(''.join(lines[1:-1]) + '\n')

Example:

% easy_install gdata
% PYTHONPATH=xyz python -c 'import sys; print sys.path[:2]'
['', '/Users/pat/virt/lib/python2.6/site-packages/gdata-2.0.14-py2.6.egg']

% ./fix_path ~/virt/lib/python2.6/site-packages/easy_install.pth
% PYTHONPATH=xyz python -c 'import sys; print sys.path[:2]'
['', '/Users/pat/xyz']

For more clarification, here is the format of easy-install.pth:

import sys; sys.__plen = len(sys.path)
./gdata-2.0.14-py2.6.egg
import sys; new=sys.path[sys.__plen:]; del sys.path[sys.__plen:]; p=getattr(sys,'__egginsert',0); sys.path[p:p]=new; sys.__egginsert = p+len(new)

The two import sys lines are the culprit causing the eggs to appear at the start of the path. My script just removes those sys.path-munging lines.