Some new path-hacking code:

- Stick $prefix/pythonlib on the front of sys.path.  I've gone back
  and forth about this for a long time; the question is: for modules
  that Mailman provides which override the ones in the Python standard
  library, should they explicitly import our overrides or implicitly
  import them due to sys.path hacking?

  I used to want the former, but now I want the latter because it
  makes code maintenance easier (we don't have to modify a bunch of
  files when we add or get rid of a shadow module).  Yes, this
  violates explicit over implicit, but I think it's for a good cause.
  I may regret this some day <wink>.

- Go back to appending site-packages to sys.path instead of prepending
  it.  This makes it semantically more similar to the hacking that
  goes on in site.py.  We also don't need for site-packages to be
  earlier in the path because of the above new rules for shadowing.
  Remember that we start up the CGI scripts with python -S, so we
  still need to get site-packages on sys.path (probably).

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 6 deletions

diff --git a/misc/paths.py.in b/misc/paths.py.in
index f774558d1..b42d0d361 100644
--- a/misc/paths.py.in
+++ b/misc/paths.py.in
@@ -38,11 +38,12 @@ if exec_prefix == '${prefix}':
 # directory.
 sys.path.insert(0, prefix)
 
-# Include Python's site-packages directory.  We need this even for Python 2.2
-# since the email package has some patches not included in 2.2 final (though
-# likely included in a 2.2 patch release, not available as of this writing
-# 29-Jan-2002).  That's why we prepend sitedir to sys.path, not append it.
-import sys
+# We also need the pythonlib directory on the path to pick up any overrides of
+# standard modules and packages.  Note that these must go at the front of the
+# path for this reason.
+sys.path.insert(0, os.path.join(prefix, 'pythonlib'))
+
+# Include Python's site-packages directory.
 sitedir = os.path.join(sys.prefix, 'lib', 'python'+sys.version[:3],
                        'site-packages')
-sys.path.insert(0, sitedir)
+sys.path.append(sitedir)