On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 4:52 AM, Sverre <sverreodeg...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm using Ubuntu and some of the packages in the repository are too > old. So I got the thought to remove nearly all packages downloaded > from the repository and install them with easy_install. Is this a way > to go without greater problems?
This is probably the worst way to do it :) As a rule, you should never install anything from sources (be it python packages or anything else) in /usr, which should be considered as 'owned' by the package. By /usr is owned, I mean that anything installed with prefix /usr (/usr/lib, /usr/include, etc...) can be overwritten by the Ubuntu package manager. Unfortunately, by default, python setup.py install will install in /usr (whereas most sources packages installed in /usr/local/ if no --prefix is given - that's the case of any software using autoconf, like python for example). You could either install system-wide (for all users) in /usr/local, or somewhere just for yourself. To handle dependencies, you could use something like virtualenv for packages using autotools. For development, a more heavy-weight (but more reliable) method is to use chroot and other 'jail-like' systems. You should avoid building by yourself things which depend on a lot of C libraries - it quickly becomes unmanageable in my own experience. For some distributions which have long release periods (e.g. RHEL), that's a significant problem without any easy solution (I almost always use a virtual machine in that case if possible). cheers, David -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
