Question

Is there an easy way to get a report of all Python libraries installed via easy_install that have a more recent version available? I don’t want to simply re-run easy_install on a list of known installed libraries, because the newer library might have a non-backwards compatible change. I’d like to get a list so I quickly see what’s changed, and inspect new releases to vet-out any potentially conflicting changes.

Answer 1

Here is a quick script to scan the easy-install.pth file and print a list of newer versions of installed packages. You could customize it to only show the newest version available (take max of parsed_version), tweak the output format, etc:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os, sys
from distutils import sysconfig
from pkg_resources import Requirement
from setuptools.package_index import PackageIndex

index = PackageIndex()
root = sysconfig.get_python_lib()
path = os.path.join(root, 'easy-install.pth')
if not os.path.exists(path):
    sys.exit(1)
for line in open(path, 'rb'):
    if line.startswith('import sys'):
        continue
    path = os.path.join(root, line.strip(), 'EGG-INFO', 'PKG-INFO')
    if not os.path.exists(path):
        continue
    lines = [r.split(':', 1) for r in open(path, 'rb').readlines() if ':' in r]
    info = dict((k.strip(), v.strip()) for k, v in lines)
    print '%s %s updates..' % (info['Name'], info['Version'])
    spec = Requirement.parse(info['Name'] + '>' + info['Version'])
    index.find_packages(spec)
    versions = set([
        (d.parsed_version, d.version) for d in index[spec.key] if d in spec
        ])
    if versions:
        for _, version in sorted(versions):
            print '\t', version
    else:
        print '\tnone'

Usage:

% easy_install networkx==1.3
% easy_install gdata==2.0.5
% ./pkgreport
networkx 1.3 updates..
        1.4rc1
        1.4
gdata 2.0.5 updates..
        2.0.6
        2.0.7
        2.0.8
        2.0.9
        2.0.14