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 (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