Skip to main content

pimp installs magic packages. Install rpm packages from PyPi. No refunds.

Project description

Python Install Magic Package
============================

Python packaging is complicated and often clashes with distro package managers.
To make things worse, now there's ``pimp``. It uses `pip
<https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip>`_ and `distutils
http://docs.python.org/2/library/distutils.html`_ to download packages from
PyPI and build RPMs out of them, which it installs using the system's package
management.

Requirements and Installation
-----------------------------

Every self-respecting ``pimp`` needs a `Fedora <http://fedoraproject.org/>`_
(purple color recommended), no other distributions have even been tested. To
install ``pimp``, first install pip and virtualenv using yum::

yum install python-pip virtualenv

After that, we'll bootstrap pimp with itself::

TMPDIR=`mktemp -d` && virtualenv --distribute $TMPDIR && \
$TMPDIR/bin/pip install pimp -U &&\
$TMPDIR/bin/pimp --python /usr/bin/python install pimp -U &&\
rm -rf $TMPDIR

This will create temporary directory and a new virtual environment in it,
install ``pimp`` from PyPI, use ``pimp`` to package itself, install that
package and remove the temporary directory.

The good parts
--------------

``/usr/local`` aside, there shouldn't be any files in your ``/usr`` directory
that aren't managed by the package manager (and even then I'm not even fond of
installing stuff into ``/usr/local``). When you use ``pip`` to install packages
system-wide, they end up ``/usr``, without the ``local``-part.

``pimp`` tries to remedy this situation, by giving you a way to install
packages through auto-generated rpm-packages that can be uninstalled cleanly.

The bad parts
-------------

As of spring 2013, Python packaging is a complete mess (just google distutils,
distutils2, setuptools, distlib, packaging, pip, easy_install or any other
crazy piece of software messing with packages). Since ``pimp`` largely relies
on some of these, there are a few issues described below. The general message
here is though, only use ``pimp`` for the one thing it is intended: Installing
the occasional script system-wide. [1]_

Only use PyPI-packages
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

``pip`` does not support local filesystem packages or checkouts using
``git+git://``-urls in the same way it does PyPI downloads. This makes it hard
to support these, so for now[2]_, only PyPI packages are
supported.

RPM-names
~~~~~~~~~

For reasons unknown, distutils' ``bdist_rpm`` command allows a lot of
customization - but not the RPM name. Your best is hoping that you do not run
into a naming conflict with another package. On the bright side, you'll be
warned by ``rpm`` beforehand and nothing should break.

Useful things
-------------------

``pimp`` sets the release-version of every package it creates to ``pimp``. This
means that you can list all packages installed by it using::

rpm -qa release="pimp"

Uninstalling all these is just as simple::

sudo rpm -ve `rpm -qa release="pimp"`

.. [1]: A good use case is if you have command-line tools from PyPI (e.g.
`hitnrun <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/hitnrun>`_) that you run in many
projects, but don't want to reinstall for every virtualenv.

.. [2]: And possibly a long, long time...

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

pimp-0.3.1dev.tar.gz (3.9 kB view hashes)

Uploaded Source

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page