installing 1.4.2

[Martin Geisler]

John Francis Lee <jfl at uspvp.org> writes:

Hi John,

Great that you got it working!

> Thanks very much. I feel encouraged that I will not now experience
> unusual problems due to my faulty installation. Frankly, between eggs,
> easy_install, apt-get, and tar-balls I'm very leery of python
> programs.

Your first place to look for a program should always be apt-get (or some
graphical frontend which I'm sure Ubuntu has). I suggest that most users
stop there -- if the program is not part of their package manager, then
they should treat it as if it did not exist for their platform.

Unless you are a (Python) developer, then you should not have to concern
yourself with things like PYTHONPATH or make. You should just install
the program in the supported version via your favorite package manager.

> And many of them include vast amounts of code. Someone suggested a
> wisiwig editor for restructured text... and it required 3 or 4 hundred
> megabytes of code!

That must be because the editor had some dependencies that in turn had
other dependencies -- I can imagine that one of these dependencies were
a full LaTeX installation (probably TeXLive) which is big.

> And I have never been able to get the pdf document writer of docutils
> to work. So I hope that I will not be similarly constricted by
> mercurial. I have had good experience with mercurial in the past.

Mercurial is particularly easy to install in a self-contained way:
unpack the source code, and do 'make local' inside it. Now symlink the
'hg' script into a directory in your PATH such as /usr/local/bin.

That's it -- Mercurial should now be able to find its Python files by
itself and it wont impact your system by installing file in system-wide
directories.

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.