Installing rdflib - Mac OS X 10.5.8

Installing rdflib seems easy enough, but I ran into a couple of weird issues that were not documented anywhere online. I wanted to share my experience in case anyone else ran into these same problems!

First, I tried the easy_install command recommended by the site. This was the output I received:

Searching for rdflib==2.4.2
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/rdflib/
Reading http://rdflib.net/
Best match: rdflib 2.4.2
Downloading http://rdflib.net/rdflib-2.4.2.tar.gz
Processing rdflib-2.4.2.tar.gz
Running rdflib-2.4.2/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /var/folders/Lr/Lrriod8lEEm63-sPBZf6XE+++TI/-Tmp-/easy_install-xa0EVw/rdflib-2.4.2/egg-dist-tmp-qvivjK
warning: no files found matching 'example.py'
zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...
No eggs found in /var/folders/Lr/Lrriod8lEEm63-sPBZf6XE+++TI/-Tmp-/easy_install-xa0EVw/rdflib-2.4.2/egg-dist-tmp-qvivjK (setup script problem?)

Uh, no egg found? I suppose that's somewhat appropriate, it is Easter today (darn Easter bunny!). I didn't think I could easily solve this problem, since there might be a problem with the setup script.

So, I tried downloading the tar file. Upon unpacking the file, there was a setup.py file. Great! I just need to run python setup.py install, right? Wrong.. here's the output:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "setup.py", line 1, in
from setuptools import setup, find_packages
ImportError: No module named setuptools

OK, I checked the directory again, and noticed that there was an ez_setup.py file. Maybe this would do the trick? I ran python ez_setup.py, and there were no errors! Here was the output:

Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.5/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg
Processing setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg
Copying setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg to /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages
Adding setuptools 0.6c9 to easy-install.pth file
Installing easy_install script to /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/bin
Installing easy_install-2.5 script to /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/bin

Installed /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg
Processing dependencies for setuptools==0.6c9
Finished processing dependencies for setuptools==0.6c9

Looks like this solves the earlier error I received when running python setup.py install: the setuptools package was created! Great! I ran python setup.py install again, and rdflib was successfully installed...

with one caveat: the build files are located in build > lib.macosx-10.3-fat-2.5 (or some similar directory) > rdflib. Make sure to put this path in your PYTHONPATH. So far, I found one file in here that is necessary for running SPARQL queries, SPARQLParserc.so. It's not in the rdflib directory at the root of the rdflib-2.x.x directory!

Good luck!