[Distutils] Package install failures in 2.6.3 (original) (raw)

[Distutils] Package install failures in 2.6.3 - setuptools vs Distribute

Ned Deily nad at acm.org
Sat Oct 3 11:47:52 CEST 2009

I'm afraid there is going to be a small deluge of very confused users who will end up needing to install Distribute but only when they eventually figure out why some packages with C extensions mysteriously
no longer install after they upgrade to python 2.6.3. For example, following the package instructions to use setuptools easy_install, an easy_install lxml fails with 2.6.3 with the very cryptic:

File "build/bdist.macosx-10.3-fat/egg/setuptools/command/build_ext.py", line 85, in get_ext_filename KeyError: 'etree'

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1512530/cant-install-lxml-python-2-6-3 -osx-10-6-snow-leopard

Appscript is another package that fails similarly. There must be others.

I don't know what's to be done about this awkward incompatibility now that 2.6.3 is out the door other than perhaps making sure maintainers of affected packages are aware of what their users are running into and can update their documentation.

There is one small thing that may help some users who find their way to http://pypi.python.org/pypi/distribute. OS X, for one, does not ship with wget however it does have curl. Suggest adding another example:

$ curl -O http://nightly.ziade.org/distribute_setup.py $ python distribute_setup.py

-- Ned Deily, nad at acm.org

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