Richard Jones' Log: Interesting easy_install-related problem
I had a bug report for Roundup recently that the demo broke when using pytz. That's an optional module for Roundup - one of very few as I've strived over the years to keep the external dependencies to a minimum.
It turned out the user in question was running an older version of pytz. Upon upgrading to the latest version the user still has the same problem...
that didn't work for me. Even though the latest version 2006g of pytz installed properly and "import pytz; pytz.VERSION" returned "2006g", when I ran the roundup install it failed. What I discovered is that matplotlib installs an older version of pytz and matplotlib was ahead of pytz in easy_install.pth. Just a head's up in case you get more bugs along this line.
It took me a long to find this bug! I couldn't understand why, after installing pytz from a command-prompt window in WinXP, I would get the latest version after doing "import pytz; pytz.version", but when I tried to install roundup in another command-prompt window, it would fail with an error due to a missing method in an older version of pytz. The way I finally found the duplicate instance of pytz was using GoogleDesktop search. Microsoft's desktop search is a useless piece of %^&* and frequently can't find files that exist on your hard drive. Then I noticed that matplotlib came ahead of roundup in easy_install.pth and the mystery was solved. cheers Stewart
Gaaar! Thanks for the tip. Moving pytz's egg up to the top of /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/easy-install.pth worked.
That's basically a matplotlib bug, since it is providing a package without installing it as a proper dependency/egg. If they want to do that, they should probably move all of their copy of pytz into the matplotlib namespace.