[Distutils] setting the right owner of local subdirectories

[Matt Good]

Oops, forgot to copy the list again.

On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 12:28 +0200, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> Under Unix-alikes, you have to be root (thus using "sudo" or "su") in
> order to truly install a package (even with the "develop" command since
> it copies some info into the system directories).
> 
> But an annoying side-effect is that, when you first run "sudo python
> setup.py develop" (or "install"), it also creates directories in the
> local directory under the root user.
> 
> Which means that, when you later run commands that don't need to be root
> to be issued, you get the following kinds of error:
> 
> $ ./setup.py test
> running test
> running egg_info
> writing flapflap.egg-info/PKG-INFO
> writing top-level names to flapflap.egg-info/top_level.txt
> writing dependency_links to flapflap.egg-info/dependency_links.txt
> writing entry points to flapflap.egg-info/entry_points.txt
> error: flapflap.egg-info/entry_points.txt: Permission denied
> 
> It is a minor but repetitive annoyance. It would be nicer if, when
> creating those local subdirectories, setup.py would try to change the
> owner to the owner of the current parent directory (the project base
> directory). 

With "make" you normally use two commands to separate the build from the
install:
 $ make
 $ sudo make install

With setuptools the working combination seems to be:

 $ ./setup.py egg_info
 $ sudo ./setup.py develop

Or:
 $ ./setup.py bdist_egg
 $ sudo ./setup.py install

I wouldn't mind seeing setuptools be smarter about this, but those
workarounds have done the trick for me.

-- Matt Good