

Write a ~/.pydistutils.cfg that puts your pip installation into ~/.local or something. NEVER EVER do sudo python setup.py install whatever.

In a comment to my answer to SO question 4314376, SO user Glyph stated: To really follow that Python public service announcement, on a fresh Python install, I would do the following: curl -O To install these two packages, I used: sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper (I recently added distribute to my toolbox because of this Python public service announcement. I like the idea of keeping a clean global site-packages directory, so the only other packages I install there are virtualenvwrapper and distribute. I originally pulled these instructions from Jesse Noller's blog post So you want to use Python on the Mac?.

In my answer to SO question 4314376, I recommended using ez_setup so that you could then install pip and virtualenv as follows: curl -O What is the proper way to install pip, virtualenv, and distribute?.
