distutils and Debian

[Colin J. Williams]

Robert Kern wrote:
> Istvan Albert wrote:
> 
>> Sam Holden wrote:
> 
> [Colin J. Williams wrote:]
> 
>>>> Should this be reported as a Debian bug?
>>
>>
>>
>>> No.
>>
>>
>>
>> I would say yes ... there is no logic in crippling
>> a standard python distribution. What else is missing?
> 
> 
> It's a matter of Debian policy to split things into runtime packages and 
> development packages. A Debian package that needs Python to run need 
> only depend on the main python package. Most packages that need Python 
> *don't* need distutils or the C headers or the static library.
> 
> Debian users know, or ought to, that if they want to compile 
> extra-Debian software that needs Python (or whatever) they need to 
> install the appropriate *-dev packages.
You are right, but there is a learning curve for those of us new to Linux.

I have installed the Python*-dev packages, but my present problem 
centres on installing distutils.

With >python setup.py install, I get:
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "setup.py", line 30, in ?
     packages = ['distutils', 'distutils.command'],
   File "/root/downloads/python/Distutils-1.0.2/distutils/core.py", line 
102, in setup
     _setup_distribution = dist = klass(attrs)
   File "/root/downloads/python/Distutils-1.0.2/distutils/dist.py", line 
130, in __init__
     setattr(self, method_name, getattr(self.metadata, method_name))
AttributeError: DistributionMetadata instance has no attribute 'get___doc__'

I would welcome any suggestion as to how I can work around this.

Colin W.