Suppose I have the directory: /home/jim/tmp/dist: used 92 available 41345796 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jim jim 671 Jun 19 17:43 demoneeded-1.0-py2.4.egg -rw-rw-r-- 1 jim jim 672 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.1-py2.4.egg -rw-rw-r-- 1 jim jim 673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.2-py2.4.egg -rw-rw-r-- 1 jim jim 673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.3-py2.4.egg -rw-rw-r-- 1 jim jim 673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.4-py2.4.egg -rw-rw-r-- 1 jim jim 673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.5-py2.4.egg -rw-rw-r-- 1 jim jim 673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.6-py2.4.egg -rw-rw-r-- 1 jim jim 673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.7-py2.4.egg -rw-rw-r-- 1 jim jim 673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.8-py2.4.egg -rw-rw-r-- 1 jim jim 673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.9-py2.4.egg and then run easy install telling it to install something I already have: [jim@ds9 ~]$ /usr/local/python/2.4/bin/easy_install -d tmp/dist -mxU demoneeded==1.1 Searching for demoneeded==1.1 Reading http://www.python.org/pypi/demoneeded/ Couldn't find index page for 'demoneeded' (maybe misspelled?) Scanning index of all packages (this may take a while) Reading http://www.python.org/pypi/ Best match: demoneeded 1.1 Processing demoneeded-1.1-py2.4.egg Using /home/jim/tmp/dist/demoneeded-1.1-py2.4.egg Because this distribution was installed --multi-version, before you can import modules from this package in an application, you will need to 'import pkg_resources' and then use a 'require()' call similar to one of these examples, in order to select the desired version: pkg_resources.require("demoneeded") # latest installed version pkg_resources.require("demoneeded==1.1") # this exact version pkg_resources.require("demoneeded>=1.1") # this version or higher Note also that the installation directory must be on sys.path at runtime for this to work. (e.g. by being the application's script directory, by being on PYTHONPATH, or by being added to sys.path by your code.) Processing dependencies for demoneeded==1.1 Note that it looked at pypi even though it already had the only acceptable version. I'm not sure why it did this. Is this just a case of a missing optimization? Or is there some other reason for checking the index in a situation like this? I have some scripts that invoke easy_setup and I'd like to try to do some of this logic myself. Given a requirement, I'd like to get the specifiers and decide myself whether to invoke easy_install. I have 2 problems: - I don't want to parse the requirement myself, but, rather, use Requirement.parse. If I use Requirement.parse, I can use the specs attribute to get the specifiers, however, this attribute isn't documented. Should I assume that it is private? Or is it safe to use. - I'm still a bit foggy on how to interpret the specifiers. But we're discussing that in another thread. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@zope.com Python Powered! CTO (540) 361-1714 http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org