setup.py should rewrite bin script when installed to a non-standard location so it can be run without specifying PYTHONPATH

Attached is a not particularly pretty possible solution to the problem. There is no NEWS entry or what-have-you but it should work.

Why not just use "bzrlibroot = None" and then a simple

if line == 'bzrlibroot = None\n':

to replace it int the output script.

I also think this will set 'bzrlibroot' no matter where it is installed (system wide or elsewhere). Which seems a bit over-the-top. Especially for people using packaged versions.

Yes, the = None makes sense.

Hence the deliberate 'not in sys.path' which should mean that it won't add the lib root to the path if it's already there. Therefore being somewhat nicer for packaged versions, no?

I should note that this is the first time I've ever done anything in distutils so there's bound to be something better. I just knocked this up to see if it were possible in a sane amount of code.

I'd prefer something akin to the attached. Putting magic values within our code which are then replaced during install seems wrong.

Of course, we may not want to do this during post-install, this is just something I knocked together.

It is not that different from the rewriting of the hashbang line that distutils does, imo. Perhaps distutils even has more formal support for something like this?

I'd personally rather folk just run bzr from source for this sort of use case; however the works been done and it should get a review.