Hi David, I guess paraphrased you are saying "don't touch your packages"..
To my point of view, the needs of the developer override the priorities of the O/S house... We should expect "old" packages on our systems from the O/S and have an easier way to update them to whatever we want.. That's why imho, we can benefit with a package manager tool that can do just that. I just don't have anything running on ubuntu just yet - sadly. On Tue, 19 May 2009 13:15:14 +0900, David Cournapeau <courn...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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
