I've got a Python module which is distributed on PyPI, and therefore installable using easy_install. It depends on lxml, which in turn depends on libxslt1-dev. I'm unable to install libxslt1-dev with easy_install, so it doesn't work to put it in install_requires. Is there any way I can get setuptools to install it instead of resorting to apt-get?
It's better use apt-get to install lxml (or the python packages that has c extensions) and then pull pure python package from pypi. Also I generally try to avoid using easy_install for top level install, I rather create a virtual env using virtualenv and then use easy_install created by virtualenv to keep my setups clean.
This strategy is working successfully for me for couple of production environments.
Installing Python egg dependencies without apt-get