While packaging Tuna I ran into an issue for which I couldn’t easily find a workaround on the ubiquitous search engine. Tuna depends on some unavailable Python applications so those had to be packaged too. After having successfully tested the packages locally with pbuilder I uploaded them to Launchpad and noticed that they failed to build. Apparently the Python installer setup.py wants to install in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages and while that worked fine locally with pbuilder, Launchpad had an issue with that:

Found files in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (must be in dist-packages for python2.7).
debian/python-schedutils/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages
debian/python-schedutils/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/schedutils.so
debian/python-schedutils/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/schedutils-0.4-py2.7.egg-info
dh_builddeb.pkgbinarymangler: dpkg-deb --build debian/python-schedutils .. returned exit code 1
make: *** [binary-arch] Error 1
dpkg-buildpackage: error: /usr/bin/fakeroot debian/rules binary-arch gave error exit status 2

Apparently the files had to be installed in /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages but how to instruct the installer to do so without having to resort to ugly hacks? As I couldn’t find any useful answers on the web I asked falkTX on #kxstudio. He said the setup.py installer has a flag to install to dist-packages instead of site-packages, --install-layout deb. So I added that to the debian/rules file and gave it another spin:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
# -*- makefile -*-
# Sample debian/rules that uses debhelper.
# This file was originally written by Joey Hess and Craig Small.
# As a special exception, when this file is copied by dh-make into a
# dh-make output file, you may use that output file without restriction.
# This special exception was added by Craig Small in version 0.37 of dh-make.

override_dh_auto_install:
        python setup.py install --skip-build --prefix /usr --root $(CURDIR) --install-layout deb

Now both pbuilder and Launchpad built the package without any issues.