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Just like many other Linux distributions, Debian systems use a strict package management system. This system “owns” all directories except those sub-trees like /usr/local, /opt, and /home which are dedicated for local additions. If a user installs files into the directories, the result is a confusing mess, which ultimately decreases the long-term maintainability of the system. Unfortunately, the current TurboGears install instructions for *nix systems will deposit files into the system-wide Python library directory, which really ought to be left solely under the control of the package management system.
Instead of those directions, there are two solutions for installing TurboGears. You can do it through the Debian package system (method 1). Or you can set up configurations so that the python packaging system will respect the boundaries required by Debian packaging system (method 2).
Bob Tanner, Gustavo Noronha, and Fredrik Steen are working on official TurboGears packages at http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-turbogears/ and the resulting python-turbogears package has now entered the stable distribution (Etch).
Installing TurboGears on a machine tracking testing can thus be done as follows:
Make sure that the unstable and experimental distributions are available in /etc/apt/sources.list. If MIRROR is your selected mirror, then it should look like this:
deb http://MIRROR/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb http://MIRROR/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb http://MIRROR/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
Make APT prefer packages from testing over packages from unstable and experimental by setting /etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 900
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 800
Package: *
Pin: release a=experimental
Pin-Priority: 700
See the apt_preferences(5) man page for information about this file.
Install the python-turbogears package using apt-get, aptitude or whatever tool you prefer; this will pull in a lot of other packages from all three distributions.
That should be it! You now have a TurboGears installation which will automatically track the latest versions of all dependant packages and install them as needed. Whenever a dependant package is available from both testing and unstable, then one from testing will be preferred.
If you want to use Debian Sarge or Sid (unstable) and/or want to use the vanilla TurboGears distribution from turbogears.org, you can install TurboGears under /usr/local. (In the commands given below, $ is your prompt.)
Make sure you are a member of the ‘staff’ group. This group has permission to write in the /usr/local tree. Debian packages set up some empty directories in this tree with the correct permissions so that non-root installs of supplementary modules etc can be done.
The ‘id’ program will show you what groups you are already a member of. If ‘staff’ is already listed then you can skip this step.
$ id
uid=1001(me) gid=1001(mygroup) groups=24(cdrom),29(audio),1001(mygroup)
If not, add yourself to the ‘staff’ group:
$ sudo adduser me staff
You need to log out and in again for this to take effect.
Install the package python2.4-dev:
$ sudo apt-get install python2.4-dev
Create a .pydistutils.cfg file in your home directory (or use you favourite text editor):
$ cat > ~/.pydistutils.cfg << EOF
[install]
prefix = /usr/local
[easy_install]
site_dirs=/usr/local/lib/python$py_version_short/site-packages
EOF
(The use of $py_version_short in [easy_install] requires setuptools >= 0.6a10, however this should not be a problem as the versions distributed with TurboGears and all Debian distribution which contain a setuptools package are newer than this.)
Warning
Warning: creating this file will effect all future installations of Python packages through distutils or easy_install, i.e. the will be installed under /usr/local as well. If you don’t want this, remove or rename this file after installing TurboGears.
Run tgsetup.py from the TurboGears download page:
$ wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/turbogears1/files/1.0/tgsetup.py
$ python2.4 tgsetup.py