On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 8:55 PM, Cliff Wells <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  The method I've been using is documented here:
>
>  
> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#administrator-installation
>
>  I'd like to add, that except for this one problem I've encountered, it's
>  worked quite well for a few years now.  I see virtualenv as solving a
>  problem that was already solved by setuptools itself quite some time
>  ago.

This is going to be another of those "dumb users" issues we clashed
about before.  Users are put off by having to read some large and
semi-obscure manual that isn't even part of the official Python
documentation in order to install packages.  What other programming
language does this?  To top it off, they have to choose from three
configuration methods, and some of them involve root changes in the
Python distribution.  And we have to put that at the *beginning* of
the Pylons documentation, before they've even installed Pylons!  That
really makes Python look like a half-baked programming language.

Virtualenv, although it's not part of the stdlib, is straightforward
and self-contained.  You don't have to modify the system Python
library to use it, so I don't see why you consider it incompatible
with your old environment.  But in any case, it installs setuptools in
a much more straightforward way than the three strategies on the Peak
page.  And we can trick newbies into thinking it's just an enhancement
for sandboxing, rather than telling them it's also to cover up the
defects in Python that setuptools doesn't come out of the box and
you'd otherwise have to go to some obscure webpage and do some voodoo
to make your system usable.  (And yes, auto-download comes under the
category of "usable" in this day and age.)

One problem with virtualenv (besides its documentation) is that it's
not always updated right away when the Setuptools version changes.
Sometimes I've had to install a package that required a later version
of Setuptools than the one in the virtualenv tarball.  Ian will have
to keep up to date with that until some better tools come along.



-- 
Mike Orr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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