installing bzr

[John Gabriele]

I'm not really a Python person these days, but wanted to give bzr a
try. I found the installation a bit disappointing, and thought you
might benefit from hearing about a prospective new user's experience.

1. I wanted to install in my own ~/opt directory. Usually, with GNU
software this is done with "./configure --prefix=/home/me/opt". I read
the INSTALL file, and it mentioned using "python setup.py install
--home ~". I tried to read the docs on that, but running "./setup.py
--help" didn't even mention that "--home" was an option.

So, I tried: "./setup.py install --home=/home/me/opt", and it seemed to install.

2. I then tried running it, and it failed, telling me:

| $ bzr help
| bzr: ERROR: Couldn't import bzrlib and dependencies.
| Please check bzrlib is on your PYTHONPATH.

There's nothing in the INSTALL file about setting a PYTHONPATH.

3. I tried uninstalling, but there doesn't seem to even be an
uninstall target ("./setup.py --help-commands" doesn't mention
anything about uninstalling). So, this:

|
| $ ./setup.py uninstall --home=/home/me/opt
|

fails. So, it seems that the install procedure may have copied files
into my ~/opt without an easy way to clean them up (though, to be
fair, scrolling up my terminal window, it looks like they're all in
/home/me/opt/lib/python/bzrlib).

Hope that's helpful,
---John