This started out as an easy task, just add a section describing this
alternate scheme, but I found a lot of cleanup to do along the way:
- fixed inverted reST targets
- fixed entries for modules (hi abiflags!) or data files
- avoided duplicating the same options listing five or six times
- added missing entries for C headers locations
- added documentation for --install-lib
- fixed a few misuses of the option role (see #9312), but not all (not
worth the time, but will do it in packaging docs)
- fixed some markup
The paths fixes were done with an eye on the source code in the install
command, so they really describe what’s actually done. The situation on
Mac OS X is rather messy: the fix for #8084 touched site and sysconfig,
but distutils doesn’t use these files. I suspect we have a mismatched
stdlib at the moment, and the fix is not even clear (see the bug report
for further discussion).
site.USER_BASE and site.USER_SITE are now fully documented. PEP 370 is
outdated with respects to the Mac framework situation, but the code in
sysconfig and the example in the 3.2 What’s New document helped me find
the right values to document for Mac OS X.
The command-line interface of the site module, partly documented in the
3.2 What’s New, is fully described in the module docs.
The purpose of the usercustomize module is explained in the site docs,
with a gentle introduction in the tutorial (right after the section that
talks about PYTHONSTARTUP; a comment mentions it should be moved from
the tutorial to another file, but that will be another bug).
Various markup and wording improvements were made along the way in the
site module docs. Duplicate and incomplete declarations of environment
variables have also been removed (the original bug report was actually
about these entries :). The site module docs are still a bit messy;
I’ll see about improving them for #11553.
All these sections are copiously interlinked and findable from the doc
indexes.
