Although I'm mostly doing IETF stuff at IETF this week, I took advantage of Andrew's expertise while he's here too, to help me get a Python library running and working. I had gotten blocked last week and we worked through several more problems this afternoon. Some notes follow for the record, to add to the couple blog posts out there that help one out on these problems.

I was trying to install pycha and play with its simple charting. To do this, I needed to have py-cairo and cairo version 1.4.12 installed on python 2.5.

The easiest way to get cairo installed is using MacPorts. This is fine, although it installs cairo into the MacPorts version of Python, not the Mac OS X version of Python. The Mac OS X version of Python already has cairo installed, but it's apparently an older version. I didn't know how to upgrade the system cairo library so I focused on doing this with the Python installed by MacPorts. This led to later complication.

After apparently successfully installing cairo version 1.4.14, attempts to install py-cairo failed. It kept on insisting that only cairo 1.4.10 was available. Andrew tracked this down, and we're pretty conviced that the information that the MacPorts cairo package applies to pkg-config is false: it says version 1.4.10 right inside the 1.4.14 cairo.pc file. We edited this file directly and went on.

Next we tried to install py-cairo using the regular "python setup.py install", but that failed -- it is not set up to work on Mac OS/X and there were numerous errors. MacPorts rescued me again, thanks to a hint we ran across from KenKeiter -- this port package has a bunch of hacks (string replacements in directory paths it looks like) to make py-cairo work on Mac.

Finally, back to installing pycha itself. This has a nice handy Python Egg available, so I installed "easy_install" to install that. I goofed and installed that in the default System version of Python, so while installing easy_install worked, installing the pycha egg failed. It turns out there is a MacPorts port of the same thing, called py-setuptools. Only you don't want that one, you want py25-setuptools if you have Python 2.5. I installed that.

OK, back to installing pycha for real again and it finally worked. One gotcha in following the main documentation page example, which is otherwise very nice -- I needed to "import pycha.bar" for the sample code to work (Update: Lorenzo Gil Sànchez fixed this already). And it did work.

Proof: