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EasyInstall Experience Reports

Feel free to edit this page to add your successes and problems installing packages with EasyInstall. Please try to keep the lists in alphabetic order, for the convenience of people who are looking to see if success has already been reported for a particular package.

NOTE: If you received a "Could not find distribution" message, please check the PyPI listing for the package before reporting it broken. If neither the Home Page nor Download URL links go directly to pages that contain links to the package's distribution files, you will need to download the package directly. Please contact the package's author directly, and ask them to update their PyPI information to include a current home page and download page. Packages distributed via Sourceforge should have a "Download URL" pointing to their project's "showfiles.php" page.

Note also that EasyInstall does not follow links on "This project has moved" redirection pages; please ask the author to fix their PyPI entries!

Installed, Appeared OK

Installation Notes/Issues

Note that some packages (including ones listed above) contain other information besides Python packages in their distribution files, such as documentation, scripts, sample data, etc. These other files are not installed by EasyInstall, so if you want to access them, you will need to download the distribution, and then give its filename to Easy Install to do the installation. You can then extract and use any other files you need direct from the original distribution.)

If you are responsible for any of the following packages, please consider making changes so that your downstream users can use EasyInstall to install them. If you're a user of one of these packages, please consider contributing a patch to the package's authors to make them compatible.

beautifulsoup 2.1.0
Bails out from a unit test. When running outside of easy_install the tests still fail, but the installation continues.
ctypes 0.9.6
Will install if you use give the package's exact download URL. (The PyPI package information for ctypes doesn't link to a page with usable download URLs; it should be changed to point to the showfiles.php page on SourceForge.) Also, ctypes is unusual in that its .tar.gz and its .zip distributions are for different platforms - the .zip version is for Windows, and the .tar.gz is for other platforms. For Windows, this is not a big problem, because as of 0.5a2, EasyInstall supports installing from distutils-generated .win32.exe files, but you may encounter problems on other platforms if EasyInstall picks up the .zip instead of the .tar.gz. If all else fails, give EasyInstall the exact download URL.
ipython-0.6.13
Appears to install correctly, but it's not clear to me if perhaps it expects users to edit the files in its IPython/UserConfig directory, or whether those are just templates.
ll-sisyphus-0.10.1
Author's name in package metadata includes an 8-bit character, which can't be written to PKG-INFO file
ModelingCore-0.9-pre-17.1
complains about cheetah-template not being found, and requires you to "Press ENTER to Continue". Apart from this, appears to install correctly. (The templates are intended to be compiled to .py files, which are then installed as part of the normal setup() process. But, it comes with pre-compiled versions of the templates, so it works fine except for the "press enter" thing.)
PEAK-0.5a4dev_r2085
peak test fails with an "IOError: [Errno 20] Not a directory" because RuleDispatch-0.5a0dev_r2083, an egg on which PEAK depends, installs as a zip, and the version of docutils included in PEAK isn't zip module savvy. Unzipping the RuleDispatch egg works around the problem.
turtle2.py
The name of the package isn't parseable, I guess: http://www.python.org/pypi/turtle2.py/1.0.0 (well, the package isn't actually setup with distutils; but easy_install bails out before it gets that far. Maybe PyPI should reject names like that.
SpreadModule-1.5
needs Spread include files already present/installed (might work if so)
ReportLab-1.20
setup.py is in a third-level directory. Also, it tries to second-guess install locations, so even if it ran, it would require some hacking of its data file path munging code in setup.py. This would probably work fine if it were changed to use the de-facto standard hack for distutils.command.install_data, used by other packages to install data in their package directories.
Twisted-2.0.1
setup aborts, demanding that zope.interface be installed (maybe they will replace w/egg dependency in future?)
Zope-X3.0.0
no setup.py
Zope Page Templates (zpt.sf.net) 1.4

non-conventional layout (the setup.py file is in the base python package). Package at http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/zpt/ZopePageTemplates-1.4.0.tgz?download -- the setup file looks like this:

from distutils.core import setup

setup(
   name = 'ZopePageTemplates',
   maintainer = 'Kevin Smith',
   maintainer_email = 'Kevin.Smith@theMorgue.org',
   description = 'Zope Page Templates',

   extra_path = 'ZopePageTemplates',
   packages = ['.','TAL','ZTUtils'],
)

I'm guessing the extra_path part causes problems. It gets installed with no ZopePageTemplate package, instead it's all top-level packages. Well, maybe eggs are actually doing the right thing; but I've become so used to using --install-lib=... to install packages, and the ZopePageTemplates.pth statements gets ignored in that case, that I expect it to be contained in a package even though the setup file isn't really saying to do that. Hrm.

(PJE: This installer is hideously broken, as it aliases its contained packages onto sys.path; the correct and documented way to specify the behavior the author apparently desires would be:

packages = ['ZopePageTemplates', 'ZopePageTemplates.TAL', 'ZopePageTemplates.ZTUtils'],
package_dir = {'ZopePageTemplates':'.'},

without specifying an extra_path. This format would work fine with EasyInstall, but unfortunately EasyInstall cannot work around broken setup scripts. :(

Maybe the user should be advised that under Linux it should run easy_install.py instead of easy_install. Also the script easy_install.pyc gets installed into /usr/bin, it should be installed without execute mode or else when we are using bash it will appear in the $PATH.

Under Debian - and its derivatives - the package python-dev must be installed.

The user should also be explain that usually easy_install.py must be run with root previleges.

Anything With MinGW (and Cygwin?)

When building with MinGW/msys on Windows, I've always found that to compile/install source Python packages with C extensions, I need to do:

python setup.py build -cmingw32
python setup.py install --skip-build

EasyInstall doesn't know that that's required, and as such, I can't put together any eggs with C extensions.

As an example, I tried to EasyInstall the up-to-the-minute PEAK tarball, and got:

Downloading c:/temp/PEAK.tar.gz
Installing PEAK.tar.gz
error: Setup script exited with error: Python was built with version 7.1 of Visual Studio, 
and extensions need to be built with the same version of the compiler, but it isn't installed.

That's the same error I get with any source C extension that I try to build with a standard setup.py install, and is the reason I need to compile in two steps as shown above

-- JayParlar

Jay, you need to edit your c:/Python2x/Lib/distutils/distutils.cfg file, and put the following into it:

[build]
compiler = mingw32

The distutils will then know that's what compiler you use, and you won't need to do two steps, with or without EasyInstall. (By the way, setup.py files can take multiple commands, so you could also have been using "python setup.py build -cmingw32 install" and you wouldn't have needed the --skip-build; that's the recipe I used to use before I found out about distutils.cfg. Anyway, builds that are run under EasyInstall support all the normal ways to specify distutils options, including the configuration files. See also the docs on Distutils Configuration Files in Python's manual for Installing Python Modules.

-- PJE

On Debian

On debian there is the policy of putting packages managed by dpkg/apt in /usr and locally installed stuff in /usr/local. python on debian therefor creates a /usr/local/pythonX.Y/site-packages for locally installed packages. When I use ez_install.py to install easyinstall or easy_install.py I would have to specifiy --install-dir and --script-dir each time to follow the policy. Any ideas how we can make it install in the right place with extra args? -- Myers Carpenter 2005-07-21T16:35:25


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