alternate module installation

[Tom Anderson]

right, i'm trying to install Mark Pilgrim's feedparser package, and one
thing it mentions is that it likes to have libxml2 and mxTidy around. i've
downloaded these, and done configure/make on the C bits, but i'd now like
to make them available to python.

i've read the very helpful Installing Python Modules manual, and
determined that (a) libxml2 and mxtidy have distutils-approved setup.py
scripts (although feedparser doesn't, but i don't mind that) and (b) since
i'm on a unix (debian linux) machine on which i'm a lowly luser, i
probably need to do an Alternate Installation (The Home Scheme), just
sticking things in my home directory.

however, when i say:

python setup.py install --home=~

it says:

failed to find headers for libxml2: update includes_dir

can anyone explain what's going wrong, and what i might do to make it go
right? there's probably something really obvious i should do, or read, but
i'm completely at sea with all this.

thanks,
tom

-- 
Force the weird stuff down!