distutils and Debian (was Re: newbie question)

[Michael Hoffman]

Eric Brewer wrote:

> I just installed Python on a Debian (testing) box and it generally works 
> fine, but it can't find distutils.core:

For some reason, some distributions split up the Python standard library 
and put things like distutils into a python-dev package or something 
similar. I think Debian does this, try apt-get python-dev and see if it 
works (my apologies if I get that totally wrong, since I am only 
parroting numerous Slashdot posts).

Personally I only see the point of this for systems with extreme space 
requirements, and maybe not even then. Would anyone like to argue 
differently?

 > 1) Where should distutils be?  (This 2.3.4, so I think it is a 
standard module.)

$ python
Python 2.3.4 (#1, Jun 13 2004, 11:21:03)
[GCC 3.3.1 (cygming special)] on cygwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> import distutils
 >>> distutils.__file__
'/usr/lib/python2.3/distutils/__init__.pyc'

 > 2) Is there any see if "dist*" is anywhere on the path?

The easiest way to do this will probably be to write something in Python 
since there is always the possibility of a zip file being in your path.
-- 
Michael Hoffman