easy_install considered harmful
Don't get me wrong - 'easy_install' (and 'zc.buildout') is the way to go. But a weak setup can bite you quite a bit sometimes.
A few days ago i had a typical issue - installing 'zope.schema' to check, if and how it could be used standalone.
d2m@zaphod:~$ sudo easy_install --find-links http://download.zope.org/distribution zope.schema
This installed ok, but immediately broke my zope3 checkout. Now 'bin/zopectl debug' stopped with an error.
What was going on? 'easy_install' installed the eggs into site-packages, adding the path on top of sys.path. 'zope.schema' (the not so recent egg version) was shadowing the same package from the zope3 checkout.
Removing the egg (and its entry in 'site-packages/easy_install.pth') was no problem, everything returned to normality.
Lessions learned... Use a distinct python install with zope3 (not talking of other applications here), whether in production or in development setups. You never know when another app or developer (or you yourself at 2am) adds packages to sys.path.
