Manipulating sys.path

[Thomas]

Hi all,

I want to manipulate sys.path outside of PYTHONPATH (environment) and
sys.path.append () (programmatical ly).

A bit of background:
We're maintaining a small application that includes a couple of Python
scripts. Over time, a decent amount of code has been forked into
modules, so the overall file system layout of our kit looks like this:

tool/
bin/
prog1.py
prog2.py
...
lib/
pack1/
mod1.py
mod2.py
...

The issue I have is that I want to add the 'lib' directory to the module
search path so that our programs prog1.py, prog2.py,... can find the
modules pack1.mod1, pack1.mod2, ... But I want to keep this out of the
program's source code which rules out statements like
'sys.path.inser t(0, "../lib")'. We also want to be minimal-invasive for
the hosting environment, so no copying of 'lib' into the standard Python
lib directories (like /usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages etc.), nor
forcing the user to change his PYTHONPATH shell environment. It should
be solved locally in our kit's directory tree.

I was thinking about putting code into a 'bin/__init__.py' file but
that's only working for modules and not for executable scripts, right?!
Then I came across the '.pth' files, but unfortunately they only seem to
work in some standard paths (like the before mentioned
/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages), and not in the script directory
(like 'bin' in my case) which is automatically added to sys.path.

Can anybody think of something that could be of help here?

Thanks,
Thomas