Subject: bug#20765: (no subject)

From: Andreas Enge <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2016 20:17:24 +0200

I have stumbled over the same issue for another python package:
python-pkgconfig (just committed) makes a system call to pkg-config.
I rewrote the system call to use an absolute path, but the non-scanning
of the compressed egg means that no reference to pkg-config is returned.

Spending a week with Python wizards, I asked around and got the following
advice, implemented in the package as
  #:configure-flags '("--single-version-externally-managed" "--root=/")
Our Python build system adds these flags only to the install phase.

We could do this automatically in our Python build system, but we would
need to make sure to add these flags only when python-setuptools or
python2-setuptools are part of the input, since the flags are not recognised
by the setup.py from distutils.

Another advice was to replace the call to "python setup.py install"
by "pip install .", which apparently is becoming the standard approach
of installing Python packages, not only over the Internet, but also locally
(for which the "." stands).

What do you think?

Andreas