Hi ViX,
You might open a ticket, but though the approach of manage.py is
elegant to many of us along with the pinax developers, I don't think
the django developers will agree to clutter their codes with anything
that are not needed fundamentally :-). They have a well defined
philosophy on their development strategy and you might be interested
on
http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/design_philosophies/#explicit-is-better-than-implicit
. To explain a bit more about their philosophies, you can think about
lack of built-in support for logging into the django framework but it
was intensional and the developers have their explanations at
http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/55 There always exists a hot
discussion about what should be included/supported in django framework
between the core developers and the community.
For this manage.py customization, you can think it a bit tricky and
require some advanced knowledge (even you were confused about the
black magic that the customized manage.py in pinax is doing and I was
too :-)) but setting/updating PYTHONPATH environment variable is
enough for such needs that can be done even by the naive users/
programmers. And at this point I'll go with the django approach : keep
it easy and simple to understand, keep it consistent, keep it light-
weight. As all code in a django project is written in plain python,
any advanced python programmer will find his way of implementation,
optimization, tweaking/hacking around the django core to meet his
requirements as per her wish and django won't restrict. Also django
doesn't restrict doing and did a lot of black magic within its core,
but the publicly exposed API is extremely simple, so that even non-
programmers (hypothetically) can follow the django tutorial to create
a basic site for them.
This is just my understanding of django philosophies and I might be
wrong.
Regards,
Shihan