Pondering Python Path Programming Problems

[glyf]

Most Python programmers are at least vaguely aware of sys.path, PYTHONPATH, and the effect they have on importing modules.  However, there's a lot of confusion about how to use them properly, and how powerful these concepts can be if you know how to apply them.  Twisted - and in particular the plugin system - make very nuanced use of the python

Comments

setuptools

[ianbicking]

What's the advantage of this sort of thing over what Setuptools does? (As Setuptools does most of the same things in terms of path manipulation, and also supports a style of plugins)

Re: setuptools

[glyf]

I don't really understand your question, because setuptools does a lot, much of which is more or less irrelevant to the path manipulation stuff that I'm talking about here. Also, although I mentioned the plugin stuff in passing, and didn't use any plugin APIs, just discussed the way it did path discovery using structured path objects. I think I might understand the underlying question though: I assume you're really asking about the approach to pluggability in twisted.plugin vs. the approach in setuptools