[Distutils] Preventing downloading for package requirements

[Mark Sienkiewicz]

Barry Warsaw wrote:
> So, do you have any suggestions for a better way to say "never download
> dependencies" for a particular package, or class of packages.  


easy_install has (at least in distribute) a documented feature that 
makes it use only locally stored files.

http://packages.python.org/distribute/easy_install.html#installing-on-un-networked-machines

If it works (I never tried it), that is a nice feature for configuration 
management; it can't possibly get the wrong version if it can only use 
what you have provided.

In your case, anything that is not already installed (from another 
debian package) is "wrong".  You might provide a directory containing 
only the single package that you want to install.  Anything else would 
be not found, and that would be your clue that something was wrong.  You 
either need to install another debian package to provide the missing 
python package, or you need another python package as part of the debian 
package that you are presently creating.


> Ideally,
> there'd be one file we could modify, e.g. /etc/distribute.cfg that would allow
> us to prevent downloading globally for all system provided packages, but would
> still allow downloading for local development packages, e.g. via virtualenv.
>   

Here, it sounds like you want it to go to the network for some packages, 
but not others.  I'm not real clear on what you have in mind, though.  
Does it work to pass the parameters on the command line to indicate that 
you do/don't want to go to the network during this run of easy_install?

Mark