[Distutils] Buildout: Version conflicts with system-wide libraries

[Attila Oláh]

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 17:14, Martin Aspeli <optilude+lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jim Fulton wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:32 AM, Gustavo Narea
>> <gustavonarea at 2degreesnetwork.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> On my Ubuntu desktop, httplib2 v0.4.0 is installed system-wide because
>>> it's required by many things. However, I need to use v0.6.0 of that
>>> package in my Buildout-powered project.
>>>
>>> But when I run Buildout, I get this error:
>>> =====
>>> VersionConflict: (httplib2 0.4.0 (/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.5),
>>> Requirement.parse('httplib2==0.6.0'))
>>> =====
>>>
>>> I've hit this problem before and what I had done is to remove the
>>> system-wide install, which I cannot do this time.
>>>
>>> There has to be a way for Buildout to ignore the global install, but I
>>> could not find the answer after reading the documentation.
>>>
>>> Can you please help me?
>>
>> There isn't currently an option to get buildout to ignore
>> site-packages, although an option to do that is under review.

Will this option be able to disregard the system-wide
setuptools/Distribute? Some systems have old setuptools versions and
users are unable to update (or better said, uncomfortable with
updating). When we give them a package that has a newer bootstrap.py
(http://python-distribute.org/bootstrap.py for example), they can't
bootstrap the project.

And what does "under review" mean? Is there a development version of
bootstrap.py somewhere that we use to can try the new feature?

>> Many of us simply avoid using system Python installs.  I personally
>> always have clean Python installs, independent from system Python,
>> that I use for applications.
>
> I hope you merge that option ASAP. :)
>
> The problem is not "us" who have pristine global Python's. It's "them" that
> we give our buildouts to and expect them to work the same as they did on our
> own machine: end users (Plone's installers are buildouts now, for example),
> sysadmins, and new developers.

I absolutely agree with Martin Aspeli here.

Bests,
Attila