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Project description
Installing and Using Distribute
Disclaimers
About the fork
Distribute is a friendly fork of the Setuptools project. The Setuptools maintainer, Phillip J. Eby is not responsible of any aspect of this fork.
If you install Distribute and want to switch back for any reason to Setuptools, get to the Uninstallation instructions section.
About the installation process
The Distribute installer modifies your installation by de-activating an existing installation of Setuptools in a bootstrap process. This process has been tested in various installation schemes and contexts but in case of a bug during this process your Python installation might be left in a broken state. Since all modified files and directories are copied before the installation, you will be able to get back to a normal state by reading the instructions in the Uninstallation instructions section.
In any case, it is recommended to save you site-packages directory before you start the installation of Distribute.
Installation Instructions
Distribute is only released as a source distribution.
It can be installed using easy_install or pip, with the source tarball, with the eggs distribution, or using the distribute_setup.py script provided online.
distribute_setup.py is the simplest and preferred way on all systems.
distribute_setup.py
Download distribute_setup.py and execute it, using the Python interpreter of your choice.
If your shell has the wget program you can do:
$ wget http://nightly.ziade.org/distribute_setup.py $ python distribute_setup.py
easy_install or pip
Run easy_install or pip:
$ easy_install Distribute $ pip install Distribute
Source installation
Download the source tarball, and uncompress it, then run the install command:
$ wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/d/distribute/distribute-0.6.1.tar.gz $ tar -xzvf distribute-0.6.1.tar.gz $ cd distribute-0.6 $ python setup.py install
Uninstallation Instructions
Like other distutils-based distributions, Distribute doesn’t provide an uninstaller yet. It’s all manual !
Distribute is installed in three steps:
1- it gets out of the way an existing installation of Setuptools 2- it installs a fake setuptools installation 3- it installs distribute
Distribute can be removed like this:
run easy_install -m Distribute. This will remove the Distribute reference from easy-install.pth or edit the file and remove it yourself.
remove the distribute*.egg file located in your site-packages directory
remove the setuptools.pth file located in you site-packages directory
remove the easy_install script located in you sys.prefix/bin directory
remove the setuptools*.egg directory located in your site-packages directory if any.
If you want to get back to setuptools:
reinstall setuptools using its instruction.
Last:
remove the .OLD. directory located in your site-packages directory if any, once you have checked everything was working correctly again.
Install FAQ
Why Distribute turn my Setuptools installation into an fake one ?
Since Distribute is a fork, and since it provides the same package and modules, it fakes that the Setuptools installation is still present, so all the programs that where using Setuptools still work.
If it wasn’t doing it, a program that would try to install Setuptools would overwrite in turn Distribute.
How does Distribute interacts with virtualenv ?
Everytime you create a virtualenv it will install setuptools, so you need to re-install Distribute in it right after. The Distribute project will not attempt to patch virtualenv so it uses it when globally installed.
Once installed, your virtualenv will use Distribute transparently.
Although, if you have Setuptools installed in your system-wide Python, and if the virtualenv you are in was generated without the –no-site-packages option, the Distribute installation will stop.
You need in this case to build a virtualenv with the –no-site-packages option or to install Distribute globally.
How does Distribute interacts with zc.buildout ?
Like virtualenv, Distribute has to be installed after setuptools. The simplest way is to add it in a zc.recipe.egg section so the job is done when you build your buildout.
If you are combining zc.buildout and virtualenv, you might fail in the problem described in the previous FAQ entry.
Last, you will need to use the provided special bootstrap.py file, located in the buildout directory.
Credits
Tarek Ziadé
Hanno Schlichting
Many other people that helped on Distutils-SIG (please add your name here)
Phillip Eby for the Setuptools project.
CHANGES
0.6.1
setuptools
package_index.urlopen now catches BadStatusLine and malformed url errors. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/16 and http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/18.
zip_ok is now True by default. This closes http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue33.
Fixed invalid URL error catching. http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue20.
Fixed invalid bootstraping with easy_install installation http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/40. Thanks to Florian Shchulze for the help.
Removed buildout/bootstrap.py. A new repository will create a specific bootstrap.py script.
bootstraping
The boostrap process leave setuptools alone if detected in the system and –root or –prefix is provided, but is not in the same location. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/10.
0.6
setuptools
Packages required at build time where not fully present at install time. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/12.
Protected against failures in tarfile extraction. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/10.
Made Jython api_tests.txt doctest compatible. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/7.
sandbox.py replaced builtin type file with builtin function open. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/6.
Immediately close all file handles. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/3.
Added compatibility with Subversion 1.6. This references http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/1.
pkg_resources
Avoid a call to /usr/bin/sw_vers on OSX and use the official platform API instead. Based on a patch from ronaldoussoren. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/5.
Fixed a SandboxViolation for mkdir that could occur in certain cases. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/13.
Allow to find_on_path on systems with tight permissions to fail gracefully. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/9.
Corrected inconsistency between documentation and code of add_entry. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/8.
Immediately close all file handles. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/3.
easy_install
Immediately close all file handles. This closes http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/3.
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