Why is qmtest installed in such a non-standard way?

[Nathaniel Smith]

[Apologies if this is a duplicate mail; I originally sent it a few
days ago, but as far as I can tell that copy got eaten by gremlins.]

QMTest installs rather differently from every other Python library
I've used; in particular, it uses a non-standard location, and
requires some quirky environment variables to be set before it can be
used.  I find this rather frustrating --- I want to do things like
test my test classes interactively from Python's REPL, and import qm
classes from other programs (in particular, I want to be able to
programmatically manipulate my test databases by just importing
qm.test.database).  However, it seems that I have to do the following
before I can reliably use the qm modules:
 >>> import sys
 >>> sys.path += '/usr/lib/qm', '/usr/lib/qm/xmlrpc', '/usr/lib/qm/zope-dtml'
 >>> import os
 >>> os.environ["QM_HOME"] = "/usr/lib/qm"
 >>> os.environ["QM_SHARE_PATH"] = "/usr/share/qm"

Would it be possible to have the qm modules installed into the normal
Python module search path, and possibly eliminate the environment
variables through some autoconf (or whatever) magic?  Is there some
reason this wasn't done originally?

Thanks,
-- Nathaniel

-- 
Scrap books wanted for recycling. "Any old text." Pure, unadulterated
prose preferred -- separated by genre. (No need to separate
first/second/third person -- facility has magnetic sorter.)