On 06/30/2012 06:16 PM, Jack O'Quin wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 10:47 PM, Tully Foote <tfoote@willowgarage.com> wrote:
>> Hi Jack and Lorenz,
>>
>> We've been trying different installation mechanisms and
>> pypi/pip/easy_install although quick and easy to start has started showing
>> some major holes in it's implementation (unable to uninstall, partial
>> upgrade failures, etc)  Recently we've worked out how to release these pure
>> python packages as debian packages and now as you know rospkg is available
>> as debian packages.
> Recent experience has confirmed my dislike of easy_install. At least
> pip has an uninstall option, whereas easy_install forces users to
> remove the installed files by hand, which is more difficult that it
> looks.

You could try using the "pypi-install" command from stdeb 
<https://github.com/astraw/stdeb#pypi-install-command-line-command> 
(apt-get install python-stdeb). This works for installing most packages 
on PyPI directly as debian packages. For example, I just installed 
rosinstall from PyPI using the following on a bare Ubuntu pbuilder box:

apt-get install --yes python-stdeb python-all python-yaml sudo
pypi-install vcstools
pypi-install rosinstall