Whilst wedding and Norway posts are forthcoming, a small rant about installing extra libraries into Python on Windows.

How hard can they make it? I mean, really? What I want to do: write a python app using the Twisted library. An hour later, and I’m yet to get to the coding part. Installation of Python 2.4 and writing basic code is as simple as expected, yet as soon as you want to install a third party library you either have to bank on the provider having generously created a binary installer for you or you need to download almost a gig of .NET libraries in order to compile it yourself followed by editing some core Python files (full details).

I’d use the Twisted binary installer but it doesn’t even recognise that I’ve got Python installed, so I don’t know how I can possibly help it out. The internet suggests that this is a problem with user vs. Administrator rights. For a third party library for a programming language? Are they taking the piss? Do I need to make sure that when I use CPAN or access a JAR file I’m a particular user, no! Absolute madness.

This, of course, was after I managed to install the zope.interface package – the tarball I downloaded from the Twisted website included it but python setup.py install didn’t work, so I had to download it separately from http://zope.org/Products/ZopeInterface.

So anyway, despite no obvious indications about it on the Python website I guess my only options are

• uninstall Python 2.4 and install Python 2.3 and see if that’s any better, or
• try and make the build process compile for mingw instead or
• play with the registry keys as detailed in this thread

but I just don’t get it. Why the hell do I need a C++ compiler or do some horrendous registry hacking to be able to use a Python library?