How do I manually uninstall setuptools (installed by egg)?

[David Cournapeau]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 12:04 PM, Chris Rebert <clp at rebertia.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 6:49 PM,  <excord80 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Ubuntu, I accidentally manually installed setuptools
>> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools/0.6c9 (by running the .egg file
>> as a shell script via sudo), and now realize I should just be using
>> apt to take care of my system Python packages.
>
> Really, why? setuptools has more Python packages/programs available
> and updates faster than Debian.
> It's also likely that some of the Debian Python packages are installed
> using setuptools anyway.
> So, why do you think apt and not setuptools is The Right Way(tm)?

Setuptools is certainly not the right way to install packages
system-wide on debian, it is very likely to break the whole thing.
dpkg is a real package installer, with uninstallation feature, correct
dependency handling: if you start installing things with setuptools
there, dpkg cannot know anymore how to manage your system. That's why
it is generally a very bad idea to install things which are not
managed by dpkg in /usr - be it python or something else BTW. It is a
much better practice to install from source into /usr/local, or your
$HOME, etc... Anywhere which is not /usr.

David