Using subversion 1.5 with setuptools in Python (technical)

Usually I am using buildout for doing all my Python development work which is great as it gives you a flexible sandbox for developing.
One problem might strike you though if you upgrade your subversion installation to 1.5 as I just did. When running buildout again a la


bin/buildout


you might encounter an error like this:


NameError: global name 'log' is not defined


and buildout to stop. As far as I digged into it and read on mailinglists this has to do with a different format of the .svn/entries of Subversion 1.5 (setuptools uses this to check version numbers afaik).

This bug seems to be fixed in the setuptools trunk in subversion but no release is made yet. So in order to get this fixed what I did was the following (there is probably a better way to do this but I was too lazy to dig into this further as this only is supposed to be a temporary workaround anyway):

1. Check out the setuptools trunk: svn co http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/trunk/setuptools in some working directory
2. Build an egg out of it: python setup.py bdist_egg You can find it in dist/ then
3. Copy this egg into the eggs/ directory of your buildout (or in the egg directory you have configured in ~/.buildout/default.cfg
4. Open bin/buildout with your editor and change the path to the egg used to the one you just copied (should have some name like setuptools-0.7a1dev_r0-py2.4.egg.

Now your buildout should run again (but might give some warnings about those .svn/entries files.

(This was done on Mac OSX, should be similar on Linux, might be slightly different on Windows due to the setup of bin\buildout.exe)

And now that it works with subversion 1.5, I am eager to try out it’s new features such as merge tracking.

PS: Maybe there is a way to specify the setuptools egg directly via some configuration. If so, I would like to learn about it :-)

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