[Distutils] Installing from a wheel

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 21 August 2013 15:57, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 August 2013 15:48, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Is it perhaps safer to suggest the following?
>> a) uninstall pip/setuptools/distribute
>> b) run ez_setup.py
>> c) run get-pip.py
>
> It probably is. I've heard concerns that people want to avoid suggesting
> manual uninstalls and having to download the setup scripts. But it seems
> simple enough to me. (What would I know, I just run virtualenv and leave it
> at that :-))

I walked right into that one: I definitely could have used a
virtualenv for this. However I couldn't have used a virtualenv to
update my system pip so it would support wheel installation.

> Glad it worked in the end, anyway, and sorry if my instructions made it
> harder than it needed to be.

No they didn't. There was no point when I didn't know how to revert
everything with 'rm -r'.

> As regards distribute, I suspect that the reason you hit issues is that if
> you have a setuptools that's older than 0.7 (or whatever the first merged
> version was) then an upgrade can end up jumping through some hoops and going
> through a "dummy" distribute version that's there to handle the
> fork/re-merge somehow. I honestly don't know how it all works, I'm just
> going off what I saw on some of the discussions on pypa-dev at the time. It
> all sounded very clever to me, but a bit fragile. I'm a simple soul, and
> prefer to just wipe it out and reinstall, so I zoned out after a while:-) I
> doubt the details matter to you now, though...

No they don't. But I'm with you on the uninstall/reinstall thing. That
would be my recommendation to anyone who needs to upgrade.


Oscar