Debian and python setuptools easy_install — “error: Unexpected HTML page found”

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

So I’m here setting up a simple Trac environment on a Debian 5 server, and I’m about to add the essential graphviz plugin from trac-hacks.org …

# easy_install http://trac-hacks.org/svn/graphvizplugin/0.11
Downloading http://trac-hacks.org/svn/graphvizplugin/0.11
error: Unexpected HTML page found at http://trac-hacks.org/svn/graphvizplugin/0.11

Wait, what? This exact same commandline works just fine on my laptop (Ubuntu, that is) … the URL is valid, I get the page I expect generated by subversion itself …

A quick Google later, it looks like the Debian packaged version can’t handle the latest subversion web pages. Thanks to coffeecoders.de we have a simple description of the problem & a workaround … upgrade easy_install underneath the Debian package.

# easy_install -U setuptools
Searching for setuptools
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/setuptools/
Best match: setuptools 0.6c11
Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.5/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.5.egg#md5=64c94f3bf7a72a13ec83e0b24f2749b2
Processing setuptools-0.6c11-py2.5.egg
Moving setuptools-0.6c11-py2.5.egg to /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages
Adding setuptools 0.6c11 to easy-install.pth file
Installing easy_install script to /usr/bin
Installing easy_install-2.5 script to /usr/bin

Installed /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.5.egg
Processing dependencies for setuptools
Finished processing dependencies for setuptools

This fixes the problem that easy_install has in grabbing resources from a subversion 1.5+ webserver. On the other hand it breaks the python-setuptools file …

# cd /
# md5sum -c /var/lib/dpkg/info/python-setuptools.md5sums
usr/bin/easy_install: FAILED
usr/bin/easy_install-2.5: FAILED
usr/bin/easy_install-2.4: OK
...
md5sum: WARNING: 2 of 53 computed checksums did NOT match

If you’re in the habit of verifying binaries against the package contents (e.g. with debsums), you need to know what you have just done … and look out for any upgrades of this package too (well, you could always pin this version in place, but let’s hope any future update of python-setuptools fixes this bug, eh).

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