dist-packages

source from :
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9387928/whats-the-difference-between-dist-packages-and-site-packages

dist-packages is a Debian-specific convention that is also present in its derivatives, like Ubuntu.

/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages

easy_install and pip are installed from the package manager, they also use dist-packages, butthey put packages here:

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages


you manually install Python from source, it uses the site-packages directory.