[Distutils] Setup tools causes problems with orca finding its python packages

[Michael Whapples]

This seems to do it (I know that this is not the correct way of doing
things, but I have made the mistake):
As root install plasTeX (http://plastex.sf.net, also in pypi) from
source by using the setup.py script in it. This should add a plasTeX
directory to your site-packages directory.
Forget to uninstall it (IE. that source installation is still there when
you do the following).

Running as root to perform the install, give the following command

easy_install -Z plasTeX

Now look in easy-install.pth in the site packages directory
(/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/easy-install.pth on my system), I
find /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages listed there after the above
command.

I don't believe this is specific to plasTeX but this is the one I
noticed it with. Also I know this isn't the correct way to do things, we
should remember to uninstall source installations first, but sometimes
things slip our minds.

If plasTeX isn't installed in any form before installing with
easy_install this bug doesn't show, a subdirectory is created and the
subdirectory is added.

Michael Whapples
On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 10:50 -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 03:32 PM 9/23/2008 +0100, Michael Whapples wrote:
> >I have noticed that easy_install has a easy-install.pth file which seems
> >to be adding the directories specified in it before any other python
> >package directories, including the environment variable PYTHONPATH. This
> >causes a problem with orca which uses a bash script to start itself, and
> >specifies where its python packages should be found by setting the
> >PYTHONPATH variable. This wouldn't cause problems except when a user has
> >more than one version of orca installed (eg. a stable version from the
> >distribution installed in the standard python site-packages directory
> >and one (SVN trunk version) in a custom directory). I found that
> >easy_install had added the standard python site-packages directory
> >(/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages on my system) to easy-install.pth so
> >making it impossible to use my custom install of orca as the standard
> >location was first in sys.path.
> 
> Eek.  That sounds like a bug.  Can you provide minimal steps to 
> reproduce it?  (i.e., getting a site directory to end up in easy-install.pth)
>