Python namespace packages on Ubuntu 11 with setuptools 0.6c11

Question

Hi fellow Python programmers, I recently felt the urge to update my operating system, and wiped out the existing Ubuntu 10 install for 11.10. I was already using python 2.7 on the older system. After I set up the prerequisites for our code base, I created a virtual environment, and ran python setup.py develop to install the dependencies for the code base. Everything ran smoothly, but when I tried to start the app, python was unable to import some packages which were successfully installed. These are namespace packages, such as repoze.what.

The weird thing is, I looked at the version of setuptools that we are using on our deployment system, and it is the same as on my machine (0.6c11). I'm at a loss as to where the difference may be, and what is causing the problem.

One thing that I tried is to create the virtual environment using distribute instead of setuptools, but that did not help.

Any help would be highly appreciated, since this is holding me back from doing any serious work.

Cheers, and thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This discussion suggest that you may want to list setuptools explicitly as a dependency for a package that has namespace packages. I found out that my packages (which also have namespaces) install well with pip, but sometimes cannot be imported if installed by easy_install.