I feel foolish now. The bit I was always missing was "-m" which stops easy_install complaining about "." not being on PYTHONPATH. I really think this should be more obvious though. Something this basic could do with it's own option. It would help demystify what easy_install does. The basic use case of "Just download and install" is so intuitive but doing individual steps like "Just download" requires understanding how all these options interact. Yes, I see "-zmaxd" is mentioned in http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall but it isn't made to sound that useful. I'm a big fan of easy_install but I do have problems selling it to my co-developers sometimes. Little things like this would help. Cheers, Stephen. --- Stephen Pascoe +44 (0)1235 445980 British Atmospheric Data Centre Rutherford Appleton Laboratory -----Original Message----- From: Jeff Rush [mailto:jeff@taupro.com] Sent: 30 September 2008 23:42 To: Pascoe, S (Stephen) Cc: distutils-sig@python.org Subject: Re: [Distutils] Just downloading an egg Pascoe, S (Stephen) wrote:
I often just want to do with easy_install is download an egg from pypi without installing it. I've studied the easy_install documentation and never found a way to do it. Even giving it the "-d" option results in easy-install.pth being created and other unwanted stuff.
Looking at the setuptools pydoc I worked out a way to do it:
import setuptools d = setuptools.Distribution() d.fetch_build_egg(requirement)
Voila! the egg is downloaded into cwd. It even seems built an egg from a tarball.
My question is, can I rely on this feature and is it the best way of doing what I want? I'd like to use it in my code and hope it stays. It would be ideal if I could do this through easy_install.
Actually this command will download the egg and just the egg: easy_install -zmaxd . -N SQLObject or if you want the egg -and- its dependencies (as eggs too): easy_install -zmaxd . SQLObject -Jeff