Archive for February, 2009

The only rough edge I have found amidst the otherwise exceptional advice on Ryan McGuire’s Enigma Curry blog is that Ryan recommends installing Python packages with:

$ sudo easy_install package_url

This means that his Emacs configuration — which, very generously, he has started maintaining as a project on github so that other people can use it themselves, or branch their own versions — requires root access merely to install.

Like Ryan, I also keep my Emacs configuration under version control, so that improvements I check in from one account are easy to check out into all of my other accounts. Although my setup is probably too simple to be interesting as a public project, there is one aspect of it that I should share: unlike Ryan, I use the advanced technology of a virtualenv to hold the Python packages that Emacs needs. The virtual environment lives under my own account, and is easy to create, access, and rebuild, even in the absence of root privileges on a particular machine. Even better, packages that I install or upgrade inside of the virtual environment cannot interfere with Python programs running elsewhere on the system.

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