Installing ReportLab's Open Source Package on a Mac

I'm setting up to do some development, and this has meant installation work–never my favorite task, but  man's got to do what a man's go to do.

I mostly (i.e. when it there's a recipe for it) use homebrew to install functionality on my Mac. This isn't a religion, just my own particular choice, and by and large I'm comfortable with it. The current homebrew recipe for Python offers an easy update to 2.7 (while retaining 2.6 as the “system” Python) and includes the distribute package. This means you can immediately run

    easy_install virtualenvwrapper

and fixed up your shell initialization per the installation instructions you are ready to go. Once I'd done that I created a virtual environment with

    workon test1

and installed the recent PIL fork–which I felt would be a good compatibility test–with

    pip install pillow

The virtual environments you create with virtualenvwrapper already have pip installed, which is neat. Next I thought I'd see whether I could just do a vanilla install of the reportlab package, which is admirably good at writing PDF files. With some delight I observed

    pip install reportlab

appeared to go out to the Internet for the package, download and correctly install it. Except there was this annoying message about how it hadn't been built with freetype2 support.


    # installing without freetype no ttf, sorry!
    # You need to install a static library version of the freetype2 software

Hmm, no problem, uninstall it again (thank you pip) and install freetype2. Except that

    brew install freetype2

shows me that there's no brew formula for the dratted package, and there's (what seems to be) a perfectly good freetype2 library in /usr/X11. This is kind of annoying (there must be hundreds of Mac users of ReportLab's stuff, surely?) but I downloaded the source and tweaked around with it to see if I can get it to “see” the X11 library (all the time wondering whether that's some X-dependent stuff I don't really want to tangle with). Eventually I realized it didn't matter. Without writing a brew recipe for reportlab (which is what really seems to be required—that would allow patching of setup.py—but how could we persuade Python users not to user easy_install?) I needed a freetype2 that the standard pip install could see.

So I just had to go out in the hopeful spirit of yak-shavers everywhere and download and install freetype2 from source. Exactly what I was hoping to avoid, but I don't remember it being that difficult. I also remember blessing the author for including an “uninstall” target to try and remove it, which seems to work pretty effectively. Maybe I'll see if I can write a brew formula and submit it. Anyway, I now had a second copy of freetype2 happily occupying its own little corner of /usr/local, and that was all that was required since the standard reportlab build appears to look there for libraries.

Which meant that pip installed the package beautifully, complete with freetype2 (and therefore TrueType font) support. Hooray!

For Would-Be Python Users

If you are new to Python, or know someone else who is, you (or they) could do a lot worse that visit Richard Dooling's Seven Minutes to Hello World web page. It explains about the easiest way to get Python up and running on your Windows XP computer.

I am pretty sure it will run for Vista too, the only reservation I have being the need to run the installer as an administrator if you want to install Python for all users. Since most Vista systems are single-user machines anyway, this isn't likely to be a big issue.

Cygwin SQLAlchemy Install Puzzler

Hmm. This Cygwin session gave me a few moments' pause. What could be the problem here?

sholden@bigboy ~
$ easy_install-2.5 SQLAlchemy
Searching for SQLAlchemy
Best match: sqlalchemy 0.4.2dev-r3811
Processing sqlalchemy-0.4.2dev_r3811-py2.5.egg
sqlalchemy 0.4.2dev-r3811 is already the active version in easy-install.pth

Using c:\python25\lib\site-packages\sqlalchemy-0.4.2dev_r3811-py2.5.egg
Processing dependencies for SQLAlchemy
Finished processing dependencies for SQLAlchemy

sholden@bigboy ~
$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, May 18 2007, 16:56:43)
[GCC 3.4.4 (cygming special, gdc 0.12, using dmd 0.125)] on cygwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sqlalchemy
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in 
ImportError: No module named sqlalchemy
>>>

Easy to spot once I focus on the filename and the Windows path it contains: even under Cygwin I am running the Windows easy_install, and so it reports that SQLAlchemy is already installed in Windows!

I chickened out of running ez_setup under Cygwin, and just used the "download tar, unpack, run setup.py install" dance. Happily this installed everything perfectly (so far as can currently be discerned). So life goes on.