Support and Known Problems¶
For any unanswered questions or problems, open an issue on GitHub or contact me directly.
Manual installation¶
If your distribution doesn’t provide a package for vdirsyncer, you still can use Python’s package manager “pip”. First, you’ll have to check that the following things are installed:
- A compatible version of Python (2.7+ or 3.3+) and the corresponding pip package
- libxml and libxslt
- zlib
On Linux systems, using the distro’s package manager is the best way to do this, for example, using Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxslt1.1 zlib1g python
Then you have several options:
The dirty, easy way¶
The easiest way to install vdirsyncer at this point would be to run:
pip install --user vdirsyncer
This method has a major flaw though: Pip doesn’t keep track of the files it installs. Vdirsyncer’s files would be located somewhere in ~/.local/lib/python*, but you can’t possibly know which packages were installed as dependencies of vdirsyncer and which ones were not, should you decide to uninstall it. In other words, using pip that way would pollute your home directory.
The clean but hard way¶
There is a way to install Python software without scattering stuff across your filesystem: virtualenv. There are a lot of resources on how to use it, the simplest possible way would look something like:
virtualenv ~/vdirsyncer_env
~/vdirsyncer_env/bin/pip install vdirsyncer
alias vdirsyncer="~/vdirsyncer_env/bin/vdirsyncer
You’ll have to put the last line into your .bashrc or .bash_profile.
This method has two advantages:
- It separately installs all Python packages into ~/vdirsyncer_env/, without relying on the system packages. This works around OS- or distro-specific issues.
- You can delete ~/vdirsyncer_env/ to uninstall vdirsyncer entirely.
The new, perfect way¶
pipsi is a new package manager for Python-based software that automatically sets up a virtualenv for each program you install. Assuming you have it installed on your operating system, you can do:
pipsi install vdirsyncer
and .local/bin/vdirsyncer will be your new vdirsyncer installation.
If you’re done with vdirsyncer, you can do:
pipsi uninstall vdirsyncer
and vdirsyncer will be uninstalled, including its dependencies.