[kforge-user] Dependency problems installing 0.14

[Rufus Pollock]

Martin Fuzzey wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm trying to install kForge 0.14 on Debian Etch and am running into 
> dependency problem.. First I get :
> 
> error: Could not find suitable distribution for 
> Requirement.parse('Routes>=1.6,<=1.7')
> 
> Indeed the current (and only) version of routes on PyPi is 1.7.1. So I 
> changed the setup.py script to allow 1.7.1 (not sure if this is OK) and 
> tried again which gave :

Ok we should update this. The problem here is that you never know 
whether a new release of a package will be backwards compatible. I'm 
kind of surprised (and slightly disappointed) that pypi seems to 'dump' 
old versions.

> error: Could not find suitable distribution for 
> Requirement.parse('SQLObject>=0.6,<=0.7.99')
> 
> Pypi currently has 0.87, 0.93 and 0.10b2 versions of SQLObject...
> 
> Fortunately debian etch contains the python-sqlobject (version 0.7.1) so 
> I aptitude installed it.
> 
> That made setup.py work correctly, however kforge-admin data create gave 
> ImportError: No module named mx.DateTime
> 
> So install the python-egenix-mxdatetime package and try again. => OK
> 
> Next step  (kforge-admin db init)
> 
> ImportError: No module named Image
> 
> Oops:
> aptitude install python-imaging and try again
> Exception: Could not connect to database: No module named psycopg

I don't think this should be a dependency (PIL was used for captchas 
which are disabled by default). We'll check this and try and remove it.

> aptitude install python-psycopg and try again
> 
> Ok database up

This can't be an explicit dependency since some people could use mysql. 
Perhaps we should document in INSTALL.txt what you need for postgresql 
and mysql.

> So I've finally got it running but it wasn't exactly painless.
> 
> Problems seem to be :
> 1) Some dependencies correctly specified by kforge non longer exist in 
> Pypi (Routes, SQLObject)
> 2) Some dependencies required by kforge are not specified (either in 
> meta data or the docs) (mxdatetime, PIL, psycopg)
> 
> Problem 1) worries me more as it is outside of kforge's contrrol - how 
> do you depend on a volatile archive you don't control?

Good question!

> I think it would be better to have proper debian packages - there was 
> some talk of this 
> http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/kforge-user/2007-February/000077.html
> Is there any progress on this?

I agree. This should not be hard to do -- we'd love someone to volunteer.

> The very outdated SQLObject dependency worries me too - I was lucky that 
> etch has an old version - ubunty gutsy is at 0.9.0 for instance
> Can anyone tell me why such an old version is required??

I believe John has answered this -- in so doing he has shown the 
difficulty of running systems's that run both again debian etch (which 
many people on production systems are still using) and again the latest 
versions of e.g. ubuntu.

> At my workplace we are evaluating kforge and if we decide to go with it 
> I will certainly build a debian package for it which I would be happy to 
> contribute.
> I do have some experience with debian packaging but I'm not a DD...

Your contributions would be very welcome.

~rufus