[SciPy-User] ubuntu's PYTHONPATH and installing scipy

[Darren Dale]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 7:10 PM, John Schulman <joschu at caltech.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
> There's an issue with ubuntu PYTHONPATH that causes problems for scipy
> installation. I eventually found a workaround, but I want to point out
> the problem.
>
> PYTHONPATH is different when sudoing, so that packages installed by
> aptitute appear first in the path.*
>
> The svn version scipy imports numpy in the setup script. "python
> setup.py build" works as it should, but then "sudo python setup.py
> install" gives the error "ImportError: cannot import name get_info",
> since it's trying to use numpy1.3 (which was a dependency for some
> package I installed).
>
> The workaround is simple:
> sudo PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages: python setup.py install
>
> *In ubuntu, packages that you install through the apt package manager
> goes into /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages, but python setup.py
> install puts stuff in /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages. There's
> a line in /etc/profile (I didn't put it there--it must be Ubuntu):
> export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages:$PYTHONPATH.
> I guess this is a kludge to fix the problem.

You can also use visudo to edit your sudo options, so that your
PYTHONPATH is carried over.

Darren