I'm setting up a new server based on RHEL5 and wanted to install some python modules which don't come with it. I've seen that setuptools have an option to build RPM packages out of modules, but unfortunately this only works with setup.py, not with easy_install. However, I'd like to keep dependency resolving of easy_install so that manual setup.py is not an option.
How would you solve this situation? I would like to avoid installing packages to /usr/local especially since stock python from RHEL5 doesn't define a python path underneath of /usr/local by default.
Best Answer
If you can use additional RPM repositories, one option is to see if the Python package you're looking for is available in the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository.
See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL