On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Gustavo Narea <gustavonarea@2degreesnetwork.com> wrote:
Hello.
I've written a Buildout recipe which relies on a function defined in a package whose name is set in the recipe's options. That package must have already been installed.
According to the documentation, I should use zc.buildout.easy_install:install() like this: install(["mydistribution"], None)
But if I use None, I get an exception because Buildout tries to use .startswith() with None. Then, if instead of None, I use buildout['buildout']['directory'], it tries to install the distribution pulling all its dependencies (ignoring the fact I set a download cache in ~/.buildout/default.cfg).
I just want to make a package available in sys.path. How should I do that from a Buildout recipe?
Note I really just want to add it sys.path, not get the actual function/module, because it's going to be used by a function called from my recipe, not by my recipe.
The short answer is that buildout doesn't support this. You can do it, but with a lot of work. As the documentation for install, http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zc.buildout#distribution-installation, says, if the second argument is None, it will fail unless the package is already installed. You need to specify the place to install to. It might be easier to use the zc.recipe.egg recipe from your recipe: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zc.recipe.egg#egg-recipe-api-for-other-recipes After using that recipe to install the needed package, you'd need to use pkg_resources APIs to load the distribution into the running process. You might also look at the code buildout uses to load recipes. Jim -- Jim Fulton