[Pythonmac-SIG] Mac Python and eggs...

[Christopher Barker]

Bob Ippolito wrote:

> You REALLY should read the docs.

Of course I should, and I did. I also did my floundering until I 
identified the problem before asking for help here. My comment here was 
bringing up the question of how, on OS-X, we want to recommend people 
deal with having installed scripts on their $PATH.

However, this whole discussion started because I thought we wanted to 
have an easy way for newbies to find and install packages on OS-X. This 
has not be easy for me so far, and I am neither an OS-X nor a *nix 
newbie. If it was just me, I'd just run the setup.py scripts that come 
with the packages and be done with it, but I want to help out the 
community, as well as having a standard approach to point my colleagues to.

> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall

The only thing it says there about installing the easy_install script is:

"An easy_install script will be installed in the normal location for 
Python scripts on your platform."

You've seen me on this list for years, and I have NEVER noticed

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin

before. I have had scripts installed in /usr/local/bin. (probably from 
mpkgs put together by Bob)

So, the question is:

What should "standard Practice" be for handling scripts installed by 
easy-install (and distutils, I suppose). I see a couple options so far:

* Advise people to put:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin

on their PATH.

* Have people put symlinks to scripts in there in their PATH.

* Follow Charlie's suggestion:

Create a ~/.pydistutils.cfg file with:

---------------------------------------------
[easy_install]
script_dir = /usr/local/bin
---------------------------------------------

in it.

By the way, I didn't see any mention of the script_dir value in the 
Easy_Install doc.

None of those options are particularly newbie-friendly.

* Change the default script_dir in the "official unofficial" Framework 
builds to /usr/local/bin

That's more newbie-friendly, but I'm sure has lots of other problems.

-Chris











-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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