homepage

http://docs.python.org/library/site.html#module-site mentions two variables that don't appear in my Python 2.6.5 installation's site module:
PYTHONNOUSERSITE
New in version 2.6.
PYTHONUSERBASE
New in version 2.6.

These are references to environment variables. The markup marks them as such, but this does not translate into HTML in a visible way. Without a text description it is also left to guesswork as to how they function. The 2.7 docs are even more confusing, adding 'getuserbase'. Adding Tarek as nosy since he has been updating this doc most recently.

site definitely needs more documentation about the per-user site-packages. 
We need to add a section about that. I am adding Christian to the nosy list, since he added those feature. I can work on a section sometimes next week and propose a patch here btw.

Tarek, if you don’t have time for a patch, I am interested in making one.

I have started to work on this; I’ll have one or two patches ready in a few weeks.

New changeset 74179a79d673 by Éric Araujo in branch '3.2':
Improve documentation for PEP 370 support in site module (#8617).
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/74179a79d673
New changeset d354802a637d by Éric Araujo in branch 'default':
Merge doc changes from 3.2 (#8617, #10745).
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/d354802a637d 

New changeset b3f72b6450f1 by Éric Araujo in branch '2.7':
Improve documentation for PEP 370 support in site module (#8617).
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/b3f72b6450f1 

Shouldn't there be an update of the 2.6 documentation too?
After your patch, the 2.7 reflects the existence of the "--user" option (see http://docs.python.org/release/2.7.3/install/index.html#alternate-installation-the-user-scheme) but not the 2.6 documentation (http://docs.python.org/release/2.6.8/install/index.html#alternate-installation).
In my personal experience, I used the "--home" option with python 2.6 to mimic what "--user" does and it took me 2 weeks to, by chance, stumble upon http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0370/ which informed me that the "--user" option was originally available for python 2.6. If it had been on the 2.6 documentation, it would have been easier and more coherent IMHO.

2.6 only gets security fixes now.

BTW it appears that many people use the most recent 2.7 documentation even if they are using 2.6, because the doc is better and there are notes which tell you if something was changed or added in 2.7. For PEP 370 there are notes in the doc of the site module and the environment variables but I forgot to add one to the distutils doc; I will do that.

Fair enough, thank you for the information. As a side note, my original question was in fact more suited for issue10745