[python-uk] easy_install pip won't work, am concerned Ministry of Packaging may chase after me.

[John Pinner]

HI,

At the risk of repeating other (lengthy) discussions on this subject from 18
months ago...

On 1 April 2010 02:39, Jon Ribbens
<jon+python-uk at unequivocal.co.uk<jon%2Bpython-uk at unequivocal.co.uk>
> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 10:14:50PM +0100, Ed Stafford wrote:
> >    Mike,
> >
> >    Glad it worked for you. Although the Ubuntu team does a fine job of
> >    package management I'm still a bit hesitant to use their python
> packages.
>

The problem is that they're usually out-of-date. The same goes for debian
whence Ubuntu obtain their packages.

The advantage of using Ubuntu/Debian packages, where up-to-date ones exist,
is that your system is under consistent control of the system's package
manager.

>    It's easy enough using vanilla python to get everything you need going.
>

The issue with using the Python utils is that they do not play with the
distibution's package management. For example, they do not cooperate over
dependencies, nor provide a clean uninstall. No self-respecting sysadmin
would dream of using them, simply because they are independent of the
system's package management ( eg apt or yum).

In
> >    the future you can do the following just as easily.
> >
> >    `wget [1]http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py`<http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py%60>
> >    `sudo python ez_setup.py`
> >    `sudo easy_install pip virtualenv virtualenvwrapper`
>
> I strongly advise not using easy_install, it's awful.
>

Yes, because it's trying to solve the problems of package management on
systems without a'proper'  package manager, it compromises those systems
with one.

I think that the solution here is for the Python package maintainers to make
sure that *they* provide the Debian/Ubuntu/Red Hat/SUSE/whatever packages,
and not rely on the hard-pressed distribution maintainers.

A kludge that I use is to download the Python package, eg xlwt, then do a
setup.py build, and run alien on the resulting tar.gz to produce a .deb or
.rpm. At least I get a package which can be installed/uninstalled by the
system package manager, although Python dependencies will not be managed
without a bit of tweaking.

Best wishes,

John
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