Don't Shit in My Flower Pot

Sometime open source drives me crazy.

This time I went about rebuilding TortoiseHg on my machine. I mean, it is a Python program - how hard could it be?

Well, it proved to be more annoying than anything I have done lately. And problems were not in getting code to compile but in getting various dependencies to work properly (py2exe, setuptools, PyQt, pywin32…). While build instructions were better than average open source I was jumping from one problem to another. And most problems were in dependencies incapable of recognizing any folder other than C:\Python27 as python location. Maybe I am misleading a bit here. They would recognize it just fine during install. Everything would fall apart at later time.

Solution was to either rebuild all dependencies causing issues (they were open source them-self) or just to move Python to C:\Python27. As soon I as did latter, everything started magically to work.

For this I only partly blame guys incapable of properly discovering Python location. They suck and they know it. I blame first guy who made Windows port and thought that root folder is a good location as any. Would you install your stuff under root (/) on Linux? How is it that same group of people that behaves properly under Linux has no idea that it should follow same principles under Windows?

P.S. Please don’t tell me that I gave up too easily and that I should have and fixed each issue I encountered. I was attempting to compile one piece of code not solve universes problems.