Question

I am trying to debug a plugin issue with Trac and TracMercurial. The plugin does not quite work for me when packaged as an egg and deployed normally.

Using setup.py develop results in plugin not being visible. Using setup.py install works fine, but I can’t debug the results, which I intend to do by adding some logging code to the plugin, so that when the module tries to load, I will be able to inspect the environment and see where it’s failing.

I tried to do this command so I could possibly begin to debug the python code that is in the plugin to see where it fails, and why:

c:\workdir> python setup.py develop --exclude-scripts --install-dir "C:\...\python\Lib\site-packages" 

After doing this, there is an egg-link file in the site-packages directory, but Trac does not see the plugin. If however I use “setup.py install”, and it copied the full .egg over to the site-packages directory, then Trac does see the plugin.

Clearly I’m not understanding “setup.py develop” mode. My goal is to get started with debugging a plugin that is not in any virtual-env, just a simple use of “setup.py develop”.

Answer 1

If setuptools or distribute is installed you can use the easy_install command with the -Z option to install the egg unzipped:

python setup.py easy_install -Z

so you can still edit the installed source code.