The gdist module is a Cython interface to a C++ library (http://code.google.com/p/geodesic/) for computing geodesic distance which is the length of shortest line between two vertices on a triangulated mesh in three dimensions, such that the line lies on the surface.
The algorithm is due Mitchell, Mount and Papadimitriou, 1987; the implementation is due to Danil Kirsanov and the Cython interface to Gaurav Malhotra and Stuart Knock.
Original library (published under MIT license): http://code.google.com/p/geodesic/
We added a python wrapped and made small fixes to the original library, to make it compatible with cython.
To install this, either run pip install gdist or download sources from Github and run python setup.py install in current folder.
Basic test could be:
python
import gdistPython 2.7, Cython, and a C++ compiler are required.
In order to produce a Debian package, assuming you have the requisite tools installed (apt-get install devscripts python-all-dev python-stdeb):
cd debian
debuild -us -uc
cd ../../and you should find a suitable deb file for your system.