How to hack Python projects

Next, you might want to do the following to isolate the development version of a package:

create a dir: $DEVPATH
add it to the PYTHONPATH variable. This will insert it in the sys.path before distro's installation paths
symlink all the packages of the project into $DEVPATH
to turn off your dev version of Matplotlib and fall back to the stable distro installed one, just rename matplotlib as matplotlib.off
if the project contains C/C++ extensions, you can:
```
python setup.py build_ext --inplace
```
The first time, and whenever you modify a C/C++ extension.

This will place the compiled c/c++ outputs side by side with the python code in the repo, exactly where they need to be, without touching anything outside the repo.

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