Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn wrote:
On May 10, 2009, at 11:18 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
If GNU stow solves all your problems, why do you want to use easy_install in the first place?
That's a good question. The answer is that there are two separate jobs: building executables and putting them in a directory structure of the appropriate shape for your system is one job, and installing or uninstalling that tree into your system is another. GNU stow does only the latter.
And so does easy_install - it's job is *not* to build the executables and to put them in a directory structure. Instead, it's distutils/setuptools which has this job. The primary purpose of easy_install is to download the files from PyPI (IIUC).
The thing that prevents this from working with setuptools is that setuptools creates a file named easy_install.pth
It will stop doing that if you ask nicely. That's why I recommended earlier that you do ask it not to edit .pth files.
If I understand correctly, your (MvL's) suggestion that easy_install create a .pth file named "easy_install-$PACKAGE-$VERSION.pth" instead of "easy_install.pth" would indeed make it work with GNU stow.
My recommendation is that you use the already existing flag to setup.py install that stops it from editing .pth files. Regards, Martin