Is site-packages appropriate for applications or just libraries?

Question

I'm in a bit of a discussion with some other developers on an open source project. I'm new to python but it seems to me that site-packages is meant for libraries and not end user applications. Is that true or is site-packages an appropriate place to install an application meant to be run by an end user?

Answer 1

Once you get to the point where your application is ready for distribution, package it up for your favorite distributions/OSes in a way that puts your library code in site-packages and executable scripts on the system path.

Until then (i.e. for all development work), don't do any of the above: save yourself major headaches and use zc.buildout or virtualenv to keep your development code (and, if you like, its dependencies as well) isolated from the rest of the system.