site.getsitepackages() missing

[wichert]

The standard site.getsitepackages() function is not available in a virtualenv:

>>> import site
>>> site.getsitepackages()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'getsitepackages'

[omeinusch]

Do you use Python 2.7? In this case, its a duplicate of #355 .

[wichert]

This was indeed using Python 2.7.

[zed]

site.getsitepackages() works on Python 2.7 and 3.2+ outside a virtualenv and I get the AttributeError inside a virtualenv on both Python 2 and 3 on Ubuntu.

As a workaround: python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib())" manages to find the location of my Python site-packages directory

[piotr-dobrogost]

It would be nice if any of virtualenv's maintainers took a look at this and provide some guidance as to where the problem is…

[pfmoore]

The problem (as I understand it) is that virtualenv implements its own version of site.py that doesn't track the core Python version perfectly (that's the issue behind #355, referenced above - if you follow that link, and the link to the various issues linked from there, you'll get the background).

Fixing this isn't as simple as "sync up to the core site.py", because we need to support multiple Python versions, and site.py has changed between them.

Hope that helps - I'm replying as a virtualenv maintainer offering some guidance, but it's not something I'm planning on working on myself. As usual, patches welcome, but anyone willing to take this on should be clear on the amount of testing effort involved. For example, technically I believe we still support Python 2.6, so do we need to make sure that site.getsitepackages() is unavailable on that version? (IMO, no, we should just drop support for 2.6, but I wish it were that simple 😄)

[stale]

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