Python2.5, Clearsilver, and the 64bit Machine

I’m in the process of setting up a development environment for a project I’m working on. So, I decided to install Trac. To make sure I was fully familiar with it before deploying it on the server environment I wanted to use it on my machine and also look into using Bitten (the CI plugin).

This all in mind, like most things Ubuntu, I figured it would be as simple as “sudo apt-get install trac”. Whoops. My mistake. It seems that the versions they have in the repository don’t play so well with 64 bit machines. It’s not even trac that has the issue, it’s the templating system that does. For a summary of the issue you can take a look at Bug #5387 on the Trac site or Bug #86685 at Ubuntu’s Lauchpad site. I’ll briefly explain it here.

Everything appears to install correctly and fine, in fact, you can even create projects with Trac. What happens is that when you attempt to hit the Trac page, Trac fails to return anything to the browser. Since I was running this on the command line I saw the text fly across my screen and, being a developer, started swearing at the computer…I hate bugs. So it turns out that the reason there was failure is that Trac did not think that Clearsilver was installed on the system. However, with apt it installs the dependencies of your packages and since Clearsilver was, it was installed. However, it appears to be broken. Plus, the repository has an older version of clearsilver anyway. Oh, as a side note, it appears that Clearsilver has issues compiling for Ruby 1.8…no idea why, but I didn’t bother looking into it, I’m using Python here…screw Ruby.
I downloaded Clearsilver from their site, and then installed it:

cd clearsilver-0.10.5/
./configure –with-python=/usr/bin/python2.5 –disable-ruby
make
sudo checkinstall

Then I downloaded the 0.11 RC of Trac and installed it:

cd Trac-0.11rc1/
sudo python ./setup.py install

Since I had made a project with the other Trac version I had I just had to upgrade it.

trac-admin ~/project/ upgrade

Viola. I now have Trac running correctly on my 64 bit system with Python2.5.