At 04:47 PM 11/7/2006 +0100, Victor Stinner wrote: >My problem is that "sudo ./setup.py install" reinstall ctypes 1.0.1 and >ElementTree 1.2.6 whereas they are already installed by Ubuntu (using >apt-...).
setuptools isn't installing these things twice, it's installing them once. It can't detect that Ubuntu has already installed them, if they are installed without .egg-info files or directories. Python 2.5 does this automatically for any distutils-installed package, but for older versions of Python you need to manually create these files in site-packages if you want to ensure that another copy doesn't get installed: ctypes.egg-info ElementTree.egg-info The content of each file should be that package's PKG-INFO file. This will allow setuptools to detect what versions are installed. The alternative of course is just to let the second installation happen. Still another alternative would be to create a tool for Debian/Ubuntu users that would generate the .egg-info files automatically, although I'm not sure how practical that is, since Debian package names do not map 1:1 with PyPI package names, and the installed packages do not include PKG-INFO files. Essentially, this is a design flaw of Debian packaging policy for Python, which has not been updated to deal with distutils' project-oriented nature or the existence of PyPI. Debian requirements are expressed in terms of Python packages, rather than in terms of Python *projects*. Python projects are the unit of distribution and cataloguing, whereas Python packages are code units, and can be split across projects as well as having more than one in a given project. This problem is independent of setuptools per se, but the flaw is more clearly visible when you try to use setuptools in conjunction with it. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig