Question

I have manually built numpy, scipy, matplotlib etc – without root privilages (I needed fresh matplotlib). All libs installed in the standard place:

~/.local/lib/python2.7

Now when I’m trying to install anything related – synaptic suggest me to install all the libs system wide. Is there a way I can tell synaptic to use the locally installed libs?

I tried to link ~/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages to /usr/lib/python2.7 – no help.

Edit:

If I clone a python package, and change the name in the setup.py to the name of the ubuntu package, and then build:

python setup.py bdist --format=rpm

and then convert it to deb with alien:

sudo alien -k my.rpm

and then install the deb:

sudo dpkg -i my.deb

then synaptic does recognise it as a package (remember I’ve tweaked the name in setup.py).

But I can’t find a way to make synaptic aware of locally installed python libs.

Answer 1

How can a package manager, that manages packages at a system level, know anything about something that is installed in a user directory, something that is the opposite of the system level?

A package manager resolves dependencies based on meta-information stored in a package (be it rpm, deb, whatever) and/or package repository.

To achieve your goal you can go either of two options.

First is to build a system-specific package from your sources and then install it via your package manager. See Creating Built Distributions docs for that. It would look something like this:

$ python setup.py bdist --format=rpm
$ rpm -i dist/$PACKAGE.rpm

That would make your package manager aware of the fact that some dependencies are already provided.

This approach may or may not work.

The other, preferred, option is to use python package manager such as pip and install all your packages in a virtual environment. There are several advantages of this method:

1. You can have several distinct package sets, with different versions of packages installed.
2. You can optionally isolate your virtual environment from the packages installed system-wide.