can't install lxml (python 2.6.3, osx 10.6 snow leopard)

Question

I try to:

easy_install lxml

and I get this error:

File "build/bdist.macosx-10.3-fat/egg/setuptools/command/build_ext.py", line 85, in get_ext_filename KeyError: 'etree'

any hints?

Answer 1

Due to incompatible changes in the 2.6.3 version of python's distutils, the old easy_install from setuptools no longer works. You need to replace it with easy_install from Distribute . Follow the instructions there, basically:

$ curl -O http://nightly.ziade.org/distribute_setup.py
$ python distribute_setup.py

assuming the 2.6.3 python is first on your $PATH .

EDIT: Besides the option to migrate from setuptools to Distribute, Python 2.6.4, which should be released in a couple of weeks, will contain a workaround in distutils that will unbreak setuptools . Thanks, Tarek, for the fix and thanks, jbastos, for bringing this issue up.

FURTHER EDIT: setuptools itself has been updated (as of 0.6c10 ) to work around the problem with 2.6.3.

Answer 2

Ned :

incompatible changes in the 2.6.3 version of python's distutil

Not precisely. The API hasn't changed but Setuptools overrides them, and makes the assumption they are called in a particular order.

Lennart:

The Distribute installation doesn't seem to trigger the bug

Yes indeed, this precise bug was detected some time ago and fixed in Distribute (and in Ubuntu's setuptools package)