installing bzr

[John Arbash Meinel]

John Gabriele wrote:
> 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.
> 

Thanks for mentioning. In general, this is just a limitation of python's
distutils. I feel your pain about not having an uninstall option, and
that it is difficult to install into anywhere but $libpython/site-packages.

If you have some ideas of what we could add to INSTALL to make it more
obvious, please do so and post your results here.

Almost all the files will be in opt/lib/python. The only extras that I
know of will be 'bzr' in opt/bin.

John
=:->


> 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
> 
>