My friend and colleague Jannis (aka jezdez) Leidel saved my bacon today where I had gotten completely stuck.
So, I have this python2.6 virtualenv and whenever I ran python setup.py sdist upload it would upload a really nasty tarball to PyPI. What would happen is that when people do pip install premailer it would file horribly and look something like this:
...IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/path/to/virtual-env/build/premailer/setup.py'
What?!?! If you download the tarball and unpack it you’ll see that there definitely is a setup.py file in there.
Anyway. What happens, which I didn’t realize was that within the .tar.gz file there were these strange copies of files. For example for every file.py there was a ._file.py etc.
Here’s what the file looked like after a tarball had been created:
(premailer26)peterbe@mpb:~/dev/PYTHON/premailer (master)$ tar -zvtf dist/premailer-2.0.2.tar.gz-rwxr-xr-x 0 peterbe staff 311 Apr 11 15:51 ./._premailer-2.0.2drwxr-xr-x 0 peterbe staff 0 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Mar 28 10:13 premailer-2.0.2/._LICENSE-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 1517 Mar 28 10:13 premailer-2.0.2/LICENSE-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 9 21:10 premailer-2.0.2/._MANIFEST.in-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 34 Apr 9 21:10 premailer-2.0.2/MANIFEST.in-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/._PKG-INFO-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 7226 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/PKG-INFO-rwxr-xr-x 0 peterbe staff 311 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/._premailerdrwxr-xr-x 0 peterbe staff 0 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer/-rwxr-xr-x 0 peterbe staff 311 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/._premailer.egg-infodrwxr-xr-x 0 peterbe staff 0 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Mar 28 10:13 premailer-2.0.2/._README.md-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 5185 Mar 28 10:13 premailer-2.0.2/README.md-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/._setup.cfg-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 59 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/setup.cfg-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 9 21:09 premailer-2.0.2/._setup.py-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 2079 Apr 9 21:09 premailer-2.0.2/setup.py-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/._dependency_links.txt-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 1 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/dependency_links.txt-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 9 21:04 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/._not-zip-safe-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 1 Apr 9 21:04 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/not-zip-safe-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/._PKG-INFO-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 7226 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/PKG-INFO-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/._requires.txt-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 23 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/requires.txt-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/._SOURCES.txt-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 329 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/SOURCES.txt-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/._top_level.txt-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 10 Apr 11 15:51 premailer-2.0.2/premailer.egg-info/top_level.txt-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 9 21:21 premailer-2.0.2/premailer/.___init__.py-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 66 Apr 9 21:21 premailer-2.0.2/premailer/__init__.py-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 9 09:23 premailer-2.0.2/premailer/.___main__.py-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 3315 Apr 9 09:23 premailer-2.0.2/premailer/__main__.py-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 8 16:22 premailer-2.0.2/premailer/._premailer.py-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 15368 Apr 8 16:22 premailer-2.0.2/premailer/premailer.py-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 280 Apr 8 16:22 premailer-2.0.2/premailer/._test_premailer.py-rw-r--r-- 0 peterbe staff 37184 Apr 8 16:22 premailer-2.0.2/premailer/test_premailer.py
Strangly, this only happened in a Python 2.6 environment. The problem went away when I created a brand new Python 2.7 enviroment with the latest setuptools.
So basically, the fault lies with OSX and a strange interaction between OSX and tar.This superuser.com answer does a much better job explaining this “flaw”.
So, the solution to the problem is to create the distribution like this instead:
$ COPYFILE_DISABLE=true python setup.py sdist
If you do that, you get a healthy lookin tarball that actually works to pip install. Thanks jezdez for pointing that out!
