Lately I've had trouble installing third party software packages into my Python 2.7 setup (on my Windows 7 box) that are released as compressed or zipped files. I finally figured it out, but I think adding a note for future reference will help, since the installation doco that I've come across for such pacakges hasn't really been that universally applicable as I think the authors were intending to be:
Typically in a third party python package, if it's not in executable form to install, you have to unzip a .gz, .zip or other similar type of compressed file. Somewhere within the uncompressed/unzipped folders are usually a "setup.py" folder, a product folder, and other accompanying folders.
What you want to do is put the setup.py folder and the third party product folder inside the base python install folder, place the contents of accompanying folders in their matching folders (eg. you may unzip a "Lib" folder that will contain files you need to include in the "Lib" folder of your base Python install) and run the setup.py script. For example, on my machine, I have python installed on C:\Python2.7. I put the setup.py and product folder into C:\Python2.7, put the contents of unzipped "Lib" and "Doc" folders in their matching folders on the C:\Python2.7\Lib and C:\Python2.7\Doc directories, and ran setup.py. Voila, it works.
Just surprised that the installation doco hasn't been as straightforward as this!
