[moin-user] xapian on moinmoin

[Paul Boddie]

On Tuesday 31. July 2018 17.20.15 mor fall wrote:
> hello,
> the _xapian.so is installed in the 
> /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xapian.

So this probably means that you have some operating system packages installed. 
Do you then really need to install these things again somewhere else? It may 
mean that you need to download and install lots of dependencies.

> It seems very weird to me because when i have installed xapian core and
> xapian bindings i use the prefix to force the installation in the
> virtualenv like this: cd /srv/moin-private/xapian-core-1.4.7
> ./confifgure --prefix=/srv/moin-private/virtualenv
> make
> make install

That would install xapian-core, but what about xapian-bindings? And what is 
the motivation to use virtualenv?

I don't tend to use things like virtualenv because they usually cause 
surprises and don't really solve some of the more important problems, anyway, 
like dependencies on things that are not specifically made for Python. I can 
imagine that virtualenv might help with installing Sphinx and other Python 
packages, though.

So you would need to tell me if virtualenv stops Python from seeing the 
distribution packages by changing the PYTHONPATH/sys.path, which may be one of 
your problems. If it does, then I could understand you needing to install 
things inside the virtual environment, but it is making unnecessary work for 
you.

You could just install Moin inside a special "prefix" instead. That's what I 
tend to do. Something like this:

python setup.py install --install-lib='$PREFIX/lib/python2.7/site-packages' \
                        --install-data='$PREFIX' \
                        --install-scripts='$PREFIX/bin'

Here, $PREFIX needs replacing with the actual location, of course. And 
hopefully, Python would still find the installed packages for Xapian.

Paul