Possibly better installation instruction for developers

[derekbrokeit]

Right now, the documentation explains how to use pip to install the develop tarball. The following is probably the best method because it will allow users to fiddle with it and then commit it for pull-requests. I don't know if you want this in documentation or not, but it is helpful, so I add it here:

mkdir ~/.pip
cd ~/.pip
pip install -e git+https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline.git@develop#egg=powerline

This creates a directory ~/.pip/src/powerline which is also a git repository for development purposes. It can be edited and it affects powerline instantaneously.

[Lokaltog]

Cool! Is this something that is supposed to be installed in addition to the develop tarball, or is it a replacement?

[derekbrokeit]

It's a replacement. I think it symlinks (or similar) to your typical python environment directory where the tarball would normally be installed.

[Lokaltog]

Nice! I'll check it out and update the docs.

[CodeSturgeon]

Personally, I cloned the repo and did python setup.py develop. That basically just add's the repo PATH to the PYTHONPATH. Now all I have to do is git pull in the repo and I'm using the latest across the system. Pretty much the same affect just a different approach.

[ZyX-I]

@CodeSturgeon You can clone the repo where you want and still use pip: pip install --user -e /path/to/repo. It is doing all the necessary setup (almost exactly what you did manually, but in one turn; though using ~/.local/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/Powerline.egg-link in place of modifying PYTHONPATH).

[CodeSturgeon]

@ZyX-I I don't manually modify the PYTHONPATH, python setup.py develop does that for me by making a .egg-link. Doing pip -e at it's heart is pretty much just doing python setup.py develop along with some book keeping.

These methods all have the same result, they are just different ways of getting there 😉

[Lokaltog]

I think I'll leave this out of the docs as I don't think this applies to any significant amount of users and because it appears that different devs have different ways of accomplishing this.

[derekbrokeit]

No problem, as @ZyX-I says, @CodeSturgeon's method has the same result.