How to turn a package into something pip can install

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.7053.1392557013.18130.python-list at python.org>,
 Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Chris “Kwpolska” Warrick
> <kwpolska at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 11:35 PM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> >> Maybe this is something which has changed in newer versions of pip?
> >> I've got 1.1 (and python 2.7.3).  I'm pretty sure both of these are what
> >> came with Ubuntu Precise.
> >
> > It’s heavily outdated, and that IS the cause of your problem.  pip 1.5
> > accepts such paths just fine.  Please upgrade your pip.
> 
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/python-pip
> says it's shipping 1.0.1, even older. You get 1.1 with Quantal:
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/python-pip
> and (unsurprisingly) newer versions with newer Ubuntus.
> 
> Debian's just as bad, incidentally. On Wheezy (current stable), Debian
> ships 1.1, though Jessie (current testing) has 1.4.1. But neither
> Ubuntu Trusty nor Debian Sid (unreleased versions of each) ships 1.5.
> 
> ChrisA

Yup.  I just checked around.  My dev machine (which is Ubuntu Precise, 
plus some random upgrade history) has 1.1.  Our production boxes (which 
are much cleaner Precise installs) have 1.0 in /usr/bin; that's only 
used for bootstrapping deployments.  We have 1.4.1 in the virtualenv we 
run out of.

Oh, yeah, we've still got a few Lucid boxes floating around on some 
back-end machines.  They're running:

pip 0.3.1 from /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages (python 2.6)

We tend not to upgrade stuff unless there's a good reason to.  You never 
know what will break (looking furtively in the direction of the Python 
3.x mafiosi).