Jeff Hardy's Blog: easy_install on IronPython

setuptools is a critical piece of the Python ecosystem: it extends distutils, but more importantly it provides easy_install, which is used by almost every Python library and application to handle installation. Making easy_install work in IronPython would make it far easier to download and install Python libraries.

The good news is that it's not too hard to get going; there are only a couple of bugs that need to be worked around. The bad news is that it can't work with any of the files that are downloaded, as the zlib module is shot.

This is all on IronPython 2.0b4.

Starting Off

First off, get the trunk version of setuptools: http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/trunk/setuptools. Under the checkout, run "python setup.py develop" (that will hopefully use ipy soon as well). Then, apply the following small patch:

==========================================================--- pkg_resources.py    (revision 65738)
+++ pkg_resources.py    (working copy)
@@ -2066,9 +2066,10 @@
             return str(self)

     def __str__(self):
-        try: version = getattr(self,'version',None)
-        except ValueError: version = None
-        version = version or "[unknown version]"
+        version = "[unknown version]"
         return "%s %s" % (self.project_name,version)

     def __getattr__(self,attr):

This is to work around #17810.

From your Python standard library, edit urllib2.py at line 1096 as follows:

+        fp = socket._fileobject(r, close=True)
-        fp = socket._fileobject(r)

The is work around #17894.

Under your IronPython\Lib directory, add a site-packages directory.

The zlib problem

This will allow you to run "ipy easy_install.py <package>". It will download the file, but fail (with a misleading error; there's an exception being swallowed somewhere) because there is no zlib module, and the one FePy is incomplete. Specifically, it is missing zlib.decompressobj.

I looked at implementing zlib.decompressobj, but it doesn't look like it will be easy with the .NET DeflateStream API.