Easy-Installing SOAPpy 0.12.0

I was recently working with virtualenv by Ian Bicking (which is awesome) and I ended up having quite a bit of trouble getting SOAPpy v 0.12.0 installed. It’s a standard EasyInstall package, so it should be no sweat, but it seems like SOAPpy (a deprecated package I believe…) has a few problems which appear to be “packaging” related.

For example, the package does a couple of from __future__ import ... calls, which in Python 2.5, must be the first line of the file. This seems fine, except the author(s) (I assume when they were packing the library up to share with the world) added copyright notices at the top of files as strings instead of comments. This means that importing the files (which EasyInstall does) will throw an Exception about the placement of the __future__ imports.

There was also an issue with dependencies, where SOAPpy clearly requires the fpconst library, but doesn’t declare the dependency in it’s setup.py file. This means that you install SOAPpy and then run into an ImportError for a package that EasyInstall should just grab for you.

To remedy these things I repackaged SOAPpy 0.12.0 with the fixed __future__ imports and the proper dependency declarations. In case anyone else has a problem similar to this, you can find the file at http://static.geewax.org/SOAPpy-0.12.0.zip

If you want to use EasyInstall to do the work, you can do it with

sudo easy_install http://static.geewax.org/SOAPpy-0.12.0.zip