I'm not proposing mangling anything here; in fact I dropped the mangled environment (as it was a hack, and added too much space) and swapped to a simpler (and cleaner) virtualenv built in /opt.
I still haven't fixed the build something and upload it for people, because of the hardcoded shebang, and yes - sed could fix that.
Also, you have to run the sed command over the tree every time you install a new package which installs a binary
How often do your projects depend on something else, written in python, that installs a binary? For me that number is zero. iirc all of my python dependencies are libraries. And if I stumbled into something that comes with a binary, with a broken hashbang line, then I'd be rather motivated to not only fix it, but to also feed the fix upstream. If the project is useful enough for me to use it then those 10 minutes of my time for a brown-paper-bag micropatch are a no-brainer.
Well, to each their own. - But I still think this is a solution looking for a problem, with the potential to create more problems than it solves.
Not exactly - for example, I depend on fabric, PIP, easy_install, nose, pylint and others. In this case, it's not a matter of fixing upstream on a per-project basis, it's fixing distutils as this is "magical" behavior I (and others) have seen, and that's not a pile of gators I (or I suspect you) would want to wade into. For example read the following threads:
I just checked and interestingly I also depend on easy_install (which I don't even use, but put it in there someday), nose and pylint. None of them gave me problems. I say if fabric and PIP are broken then fix them.
easy_install is irrelevant anyways, nobody in their right mind would use that on a production system.
I'm surprised having the hardcoded paths didn't bite you - of course, how frequently are you moving the interpreter, or installing multiple versions of the interpreter (with the same dependencies) with a shared bin dir?
I still haven't fixed the build something and upload it for people, because of the hardcoded shebang, and yes - sed could fix that.